Successfully terminated early with no penalty?

I heard this was so impossible, I thought I'd share to give hope, as it appears to be happening.

I joined Virgin Media in December 2016 on a Basic TV+50Mbps+Phone package. I found the contention was horrendous in the evenings - typically <5Mbps at Speedtest, although it often was completely unuseable which would imply slower.

They promised a cabinet upgrade for end of March, but that passed. They then promised again for end June, but I had no reason to trust that, so I (rashly) bought a BT Openreach contract, assuming I had grounds to cancel Virgin once I had an alternate:

I then read a lot about people who had found it impossible without the £240 exit fee.

So, rather than waste an hour on the phone arguing the case, I wrote a two page letter with a history of my complaints and responses. I also had a history of Speedtest emails that I had sent to myself each time, and included those. I posted it off, and resigned myself to getting a no.

So - imagine my surprise when I got a call last week. The agent said she didn't even know I'd sent a letter, but had just been advised I wanted to leave, and she was going to process it. I would have to let the 30day notice period play out, but there was no early termination. I would also have to return the boxes.

I've not had a shipping box or termination letter yet, but here's hoping it's on the way. Not quite sure how I got away with it, and we'll see if it eventuates, but I was pleasantly surprised.

To be fair, Virgin's customer support has been surprisingly reasonable every time. And I will miss TiVO. Shame their network sucks.


D

Not totally impossible as you've seen, so well done

The other area, which I caught them on, was that if they attempt to "repair" an issue 3 times without success, you have the right to terminate the contract immediately as it breaks their terms and conditions irrespective of the term you have left.

I was hopeful that my issue would be resolved with their broadband service (large swathes of packet loss not attributed to over-utilisation but more their traffic management system) especially since I'd had a 1st line engineer, then a senior engineer, multiple conversations with level 2 (after much fighting with offshore to transfer me). The final straw was both an area manager as well as principle network engineer to visit the property and investigate the links between that and the CTMS, including street amplifier, to ascertain what was causing the packet loss only for a 1st line engineer to show up.

It can definitely be done but you have to jump through their hoops before you can exercise your contractual right to leave without penalty.