Tired of the silly games VM play

I've been a customer since the early days of Bradford Cable, 20 years ago now. Time after time I've had to call the retention team to get my price sorted as the generic update system of sending a letter just puts the price up and up with a big bang every time. They manage to 'lose' any ongoing discounts and last time I was also annoyed to lose my promised BB speed upgrade through someone not giving me the right story.

Anyway, my 'loyalty' discount seems to have stopped, half-way through the current contract. Whatever happened when I renewed last November/December didn't extend or renew the discount. Yes, I do expect some sort of loyalty offer after all this time with them. If I had my way it would reduce by £1 a year!

I called retentions and I'm horrified to be told that they can only give me half the discount I had previously under 'loyalty' and to do that they would have to recalculate the entire package yet again, a new 12 month contract and putting my monthly cost up by a whopping £14 !

My existing contract runs out before the end of the year. I've declined accepting the generous offer they made and will happily dump VM as soon as I can move to a new provider. I'm sick of being messed about, why can't they see that customers are getting pee'd off with these sort of antics. No way am I going to keep losing out like this.

Edit: Is there anywhere to look to find a new ISP that offers a fixed IP address, without the £5 a month extra cost some seem to have. ?

Edited by TMCR (Sun 26-Jun-16 15:58:53)

Plusnet its a one time cost of £5 for Static IP. Not monthly.

Thanks for that, always worth asking as it can take ages to find these things out

I left VM about a month ago, mainly due to price. I was paying £43 for 150Mb and a phone (which i only had to get a discount). My mate had just broadband and was paying around £32 a month.

I asked retention why I was paying more and if i removed the phone would i save money, i was told it would cost more without the phone as I got a discount. I said that's mad and asked why others pay less for the same thing, I was told, it's an older offer/price.

They didn't seem to care I was leaving, i didn't even get offered a new price, I was just let go. Terrible company.

Yep, this is what they're like now. Don't care about customers, just expect us to keep paying more and more. 'Customer Service' ? Rubbish...

Their shops clearly state that you can have broadband without a phone line, what they don't say is that you'll pay through the nose for it. Don't take my word for it - http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/broadband-on-...

Then look at the same broadband speeds WITH a phone line - http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broad...

AMAZING, it's cheaper to have broadband with a [hone line than without - how do they justify this crazy situation ? I'm not looking at the initial offer prices, but at the 'after 12 months' cost.

Yeah, i guess they're expecting you to use it if you have it there, but i didn't even have a phone connected, not 1p was made from me having it.

All i wanted was a deal closer to what my mate paid, BT were doing £125 mastercard, £131 topcashback and although not as fast, the connection is far more stable and i find downloads/websites load quicker.

The phone is connected, to an answering machine that plays out a message telling callers we screen all incoming calls. It stops a lot of the crud like 'your computer is affecting our internets' or 'press 5 to claim your PPI'. I can block numbers too, which is good. Only my in-laws call that line.

All our outgoing calls are via mobile phones, we've got a bundle that works out a heck of a lot cheaper than paying a connection charge of 17.5p plus 11.25p a minute to VM. I also have VOIP on either my desk at home of via my mobile, no connection charge and only 1.5p a minute daytime to UK landlines. Why do I need two bundles? It makes sense to do it on mobile as I can use that at home or on the move.

We only have the basic TV service, although they gave us a Tivo box when the last one went scatty. We have our own Freeview HD PVR so no need for cable TV, we just don't watch all the extra channels.

The only advantage seems to be speed and I really don't need 200mbps download, what I do need is upload speed to be faster and I'll get that with BT or similar fibre. I already have mobile broadband with EE and get 48 down / 24 up as I've line of sight with the mast.

I've not even started to look at cashback and incentives to move. What I do need is a static IP and that's put me off BT as they refuse to give them unless you take a business line.

The fact i live alone, the speeds I didn't really need, I signed up for 50Mb i think it was, they upped to 100Mb then 150Mb, free, but the prices seemed to go up to. I signed up for £34.99 a month (incl line), but somehow it managed to get to near £45 last few months before i cancelled.

I can't fault the connection I had, went down once in 18 months for an hr or two.

They also have the cheek to ask their superhub back or charge £50 after 18months. Not that it's much use, but still.

The only speed increase I've wanted was on upload, I've had to go up to the 200mbps option to get 12mbps upload. I was supposed to get a free upgrade from 100/6 to 150/10 but the guy who did my renewal swore blind that 150 down would only get 6 up and persuaded me to stick with 100. That then became fixed on my contract, the upgrade path wiped out.

I refer to their own website at https://my.virginmedia.com/traffic-management/traffi... which shows a VIVID150 product they now claim does not exist with 10mbps upload clearly stated. I can also see that 152/12 went to 200/12 so no change in upload speed on the higher tier

In order to regain my 'loyalty' discount, or rather just half of it, I would have to sign up for a new contract at £56 a month. I was paying £36.99 a month prior to the discount expiring.

Not had many issues with connection, I'll give them that, but customer service is pathetic, to say the least. Script monkeys in another country telling you to switch off and back on again - they've been watching too much TV !

After a lot of messing about writing to their complaints people and getting a really stupid load of tosh in the response I sent email to 'Tom Mockridge'. OK, I know he'll never see it and it's the exec office who deal with it.

A lot more messing about followed with people saying they'd call me, then didn't. Spoke to a young lady who didn't seem at all interested in keeping a customer and could not grasp the concept that I was not happy with a hike in price of £18 a month and was not going to renew.

Eventually I got a call from a 'manager'. This was after a further two weeks of having to email and telephone to chase this up, despite being told twice that someone would call me 'within 48 hours'

After a bit of talking over the issues he seemed to be getting it. But, he said he couldn't do a lot for me as they've stopped giving loyalty discounts like they used to, ongoing. Now you might get a discount for 3-6 months when you renew your contract but that's about it.

I went over the fact that we have Freeview HD and our own HD PVR which I bought to replace a VHS VCR. We get all the standard Freeview channels plus some VM charge extra for, such as Vintage TV. I then went on to explain that the only people who call our VM phone number are PPI claims companies, overseas call centres and the month-in-law. I have a VOIP line already set up and working should anyone really need a 'local' number (like the mother-in-law).

We then went down that slippery path of going Broadband only. Vivid 200 is my current level. That's £45.25 a month, without phone line or TV package. I told him about the fiasco last time I renewed where the promised 'free speed upgrade' was negated because the person who dealt with me got their facts wrong so I'd been upgraded to 200 from 100 but given a rolling credit to compensate.

25 minutes of the conversation went by and eventually he agreed to put me on Vivid200 only and it would be £35.25 a month. He's also given a 12 months loyalty discount but after that I will no doubt have to do battle yet again and have to explain all this to someone who's not going to budge an inch. I had the weekend to consider it, and it didn't take that long to decide.

I did go round various other ISP's to try and get a good deal but I've not had a BT phone line for over 20 years. I was with Ionica before Virgin, they went bust in the 90's. Factoring in the cost of having a new line installed, plus 'activation' and my need to have as fixed IP (or as near as I have had from VM over the years) and get a good price that I can afford (on a pension now) I couldn't get much below £40. The packages I could get were capped upload speed or no fixed IP or went up with a bang after 12 months.

Who knows what will be available in 12 months time, I may be forced to move to a new ISP as I really don't want weeks of trying to get someone with a bit of sense to look at my account. I will have been with them 20 years in October - what price loyalty ?

Apart from a few outages of a couple of hours each time, usually at 3am, I've not had many major issues, or congestion. I get good speeds - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/14727...

Just so annoying that they are terrible at communication, which is bad for a communications company...