Virgin Media

Having been with VM for nearly 10 years, starting with dial-up and now on their broadband as there is no cable in our area. We are now moving house and I phoned VM to move my broadband. The helpful young chap then informed me that this would mean a new account being created and that broadband via BT is no longer offered!! Therefore our service stops on Boxing Day and our email addresses die 90 days later!!!

I did ask if he was joking but no he was serious, in fact so serious that he did not even say sorry.

To cap it all we have had a couple of emails from VM saying sorry to see you go and will you change your mind. They are even worse than I thought could be possible.

A lovely Christmas present from VM.

Take my advice and steer clear of VM

So, VM no longer sell a type of service. You are choosing to move to a place that they don't sell a service. But it is their fault? Sorry, but if you move somewhere that a company does not sell in then what else do you expect them to do?

And allowing to keep your email for 90 days seems fair enough to me.

I know this seems terrible to you but if the company don't have a service offering where you are moving to then they can't sell it to you.

Admittedly the emails asking you to change your mind are rather ironic but that is almost certainly just an automated system - and may be they think you will change your mind about moving house if they ask you enough times.

However, the date seems a bit odd. Are you actually moving on boxing day? If not then are you moving before then (in which case VM not being cancelled at the old house is irrelevant)? If you are moving after Boxing Day then did you make clear to them you needed the service up until the date you move?

This is hardly VM's fault. You are moving house to a location where they don't offer broadband. They announced weeks ago that they weren't going to be using BT's copper network for new customers / accounts. This is for the very good reason that BT copper is barely proper broadband and is far off Virgin's fibre / cable standard. Virgin have ditched a poor platform that gave their service a bad name and for little profit.

Your best hope is that BT Infinity FTTC is up and running in your new location. This will give you excellent broadband with up to 80Mb/20Mb depending on the package you choose and how far from the cabinet you are. There is no announced prospect of VM using BT fibre to add to its services in Openreach areas.

Chances of VM buying and selling a GEA-FTTC service is tiny.

The Virgin National ADSL service was always under resourced and performed worse than technically possible for ADSL/ADSL2+. There was a short time frame they almost started an IPTV product years ahead of BT TV, but never happened.

They can't have been that bad as you stated that you have been with them for 10 years.

Did he complain about the broadband service received? The complaint seems to be purely that he cannot stay with them .

It sounds a bit brutal, but in a way you have been delivered from a terrible future service.

Given that your new area does not have VM cable, amongst the worst telephone line broadband provisions is VM's. You would have been unwise to go for that, other than for the retention of your email address.

If you tell us the new exchange and the type of usage you have - such as gaming or not, P2P, catchup TV, live TV streaming and so on, we should be able to suggest a decent provider.

I suggest you sort out a new email address ASAP, as you could start using that immediately for all new outgoing and reply emails, giving you the maximum time for all your contacts and shopping accounts to swap to using the new one. A panic change at the last minute of your 90 days isn't a good idea, and once you move house you could have a lot of other things to work out without email being an issue.

I don't like the freebies, like gmail and MS Outlook and the like. Too much scope for snooping for advertising and so on. I prefer paid for services by the specialist companies. I've got a writeup on the subject with a link there to my recommended host.

Whichever way you go, it needs to be not with whichever new ISP you choose. ISP email is often a nasty tie-in if you want to change. The way I suggest you never need to change your email address again after this time.

Hang on! Is there VM cable in your new area then? You say there isn't where you are, but don't tell us about the new place. The fact a new account would be needed sounds as though their cable service is available.

Afraid to say that there is no cable in the area or any planned.

I did expect to be able to just move my service and not get caught up in having to open a new account/service and therefore falling foul of their decision not to open new accounts.

This also means that if you have VM cable and move to a non-cable area you will lose you email accounts.

When you start totting up the number of people, places and websites that you have given your email address to the becomes endless.

That's why I suggested in my first post you get on with setting up a new email address or addresses ASAP . I occasionally still discover ones I missed, (that obviously don't matter), and I got my own domain years ago.

You are usually up and running in less than an hour after signing up.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 06-Dec-13 14:36:59)