Ofcom's recent customer satisfaction survey

The Register has an article, and some trenchant comments, about the showing of Virgin Media in Ofcom's recent customer satisfaction survey...

Perhaps the problem is that when you promise so much people expect a lot.

Indeed. The disconnect (ho-ho!) between promise and delivery...

This might go some way to meeting expectations.

Virgin Upgrades

I am on 50Mb so have always got 50Mb 24/7 without fail. 50Mb is already set at 53Mb to cover overheads. Those on 10mb 30Mb and 100Mb will now be able to get what it says on the tin rather than 9.5Mb 28Mb and 98 Mb.

I think it ironic that VM gets stats far closer to what they promise than any other ISP yet comes off so relatively badly in customer surveys. As has been said VM customers have even higher expectations.

In reply to a post by roughbeast:

I think it ironic that VM gets stats far closer to what they promise than any other ISP yet comes off so relatively badly in customer surveys. As has been said VM customers have even higher expectations.

The technology ensures that the equivalent of the sync rate will be what was sold unless there was an error of some sort. ADSL is highly dependent on the phone line and the public are by and large too poorly informed to properly understand that.

VM's practice of no pre-emptive capacity upgrades ensures that a percentage of their customers will be getting pretty abysmal performance at peak times and sometimes beyond. Their tardy resolution of such issues alongside that ensures a high level of complaints - the majority who get what they were sold are for the most part silent. Selling high headline speed products on marginal infrastructure makes it possible for a single heavy downloader/uploader to have an adverse impact on his neighbours doesn't help either - on ADSL a single service abuser won't impact anybody.

Using low quality offshore support who appear to follow a strict script and then invent complete BS when the script runs out ensures poor TS ratings.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Perhaps the problem is that when you promise so much people expect a lot.

indeed.

incidently the downward spiral on that survey data started oct 2010, around the time VM started doing uplifts and free tier upgrades.

kwikbreaks has summed it up, poor quality support
they had what appered to be an almost nationwide slowdown of broadband to almost zero speed for some hours this morning (packet loss caused by something they'd done somewhere), for a long time their website service status page had a "404 not found"

It took hours before they managed to post something in their own support forum to tell people that there was a centralised problem...

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

VM's practice of no pre-emptive capacity upgrades ensures that a percentage of their customers will be getting pretty abysmal performance at peak times and sometimes beyond. Their tardy resolution of such issues alongside that ensures a high level of complaints - the majority who get what they were sold are for the most part silent. Selling high headline speed products on marginal infrastructure makes it possible for a single heavy downloader/uploader to have an adverse impact on his neighbours doesn't help either - on ADSL a single service abuser won't impact anybody.

Using low quality offshore support who appear to follow a strict script and then invent complete BS when the script runs out ensures poor TS ratings.

An excellent summary of VM's performance!
Must try to remember to copy that to inquiries from prospective customers....