How can I break the contract?

I'll forgo the tales of woe - basically I've been on 50MB for a year and gotten just about 25% of that - and Virgin are refusing to compensate my despite dozens of engineer visits and 4 different super hubs.

I want to cancel but still have 6 months left on my "contract". Any advice how I can cancel without an ETF?

Much appreciated.

Geoffrey

I would begin by following steps mentioned in the link-

http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf...

You should be able to downgrade to 30Mbps or 10Mbs without penalty - it's only terminating the service that triggers a penalty. My area was fine on 50Mbps and then went to the dogs with a fix time 3 months away. I called retentions and asked about penalties should I downgrade and got that info from them. I went down to 10Mbps and even though the are is oversubscribed it will deliver that virtually all the time.

Getting 10Mbps when you are paying for 10 is less frustrating than frequently getting 10Mbps when you are paying for 50. Of course you will also suffer the STM throttling if you exceed the peak time download limits.

@NilSatisOptimum - Thanks for the PDF link!

@kwikbreaks - Well I think me cancelling finally woke them up. A retention specialist phoned up the next day and managed to book a re-pull for this Monday - something that the last 4 engineers all said was needed yet did not get done (and something I myself have tried to arrange since August).

I'm hopefully optimistic the re-pull will fix my broadband issues, but overall I'm pretty surprised to see how little communication the CS folks have with the engineers and vice versa. Sending 4-5 engineers to the same property for the same problem is not the most cost-effective way to run a business...the CS people admitted to me that outside of email, they have no way of contacting engineers (or their line managers) directly.

I'll let everyone know how the re-pull goes.

I had (or should I say still having) the same issue. See here for the bulk of the issue: http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-50Mb-broad...

We have an engineer coming on Saturday and if he see's the issues we've reported (unlikely due to it being in the day), VM will be cancelling our connection of just over a month (long story) and will be refunding every penny we've paid.

If you want more info, let me know.

could you let us know how you got on with the change to your service. Either a repull or a downgrade

Will probably move forward with a downgrade. Virgin has sent 3 different engineers to our property in the last two days. The first guy was given no instructions on his work order, and the second guy ran a test that delivered 90MB (or so he claimed) - yet he didn't want to see the speedtest results I saved from the nights and weekends showing between 9-40mb. I don't expect 100MB, but 40% of the speed is a bit much.

My guess is that my area has heavy contention, but it's really frustrated that they don't have tools like BT to run line tests at random points during the day. Everyone in my area is at work during the day, so yeah of course it's going to be fast!