New to Virgin

Moving house very shortly and new property is not with BT....all wired up for Virgin though.

BT wanted silly money to install a line unless i took their broadband etc etc

So, reluctantly, i have left BE and joined the Virgin mob.

What should i expect?

I recently phoned Virgin Media customer services and it reminded me why I left them 5 years ago.

Seems impossible to get to speak to the same person twice if needed.

I agreed a verbal contract at one price but they inputed a higher cost into the computer, then denied ever given the lower price - they soon gave me the original price when the original recording of the call was replayed.

Customer experience score - less than 0/10

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

In the years I was with them I never experienced anything like this

I have been with Virgin Media now for over 6 years.

The service is on the whole, very reliable. I had my speeds doubled a while back and I do generally get download speeds of between 90-100Mbps.

I called them to question when the upload speed was going to be doubled as I was still only getting a maximum of 4.8Mbps. I mentioned that I was considering a move to BT Infinity because of this. This resulted in me being connected to a UK support representative who was able to run tests through a remote connection via my laptop. The issue was down to my Upload package not being changed on their system, when they doubled my download speed (if that makes sense.) Anyway, all sorted now

I must admit that on the occasions where I have spoken to the support people abroad, it can be frustrating.

However I am happy with the service I get from Virgin Media.

In reply to a post by pete_thomson:

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

In the years I was with them I never experienced anything like this

Well I've known a bunch of people who have.

You are probably referring to the publicly advertised traffic management. New customers will be on the new products which reduce speeds to half rather than the old ones which knocked you back 75%. If you take 100Mbps and exceed 20GB in the morning period or 10GB in the afternoon/evening period you'll be slowed to 50Mbps for 5 hours which is still double anything Sky deliver on ADSL and pretty close to the Sky fibre maximum.

Of course if it's P2P you are talking about then that is managed within published hours and you probably won't get anywhere close to headline speeds regardless of download volume.

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/STM_30Mb_above_400...

VM is very much a curates egg. If you are in an area that hasn't been oversold it's very good apart from the inescapable jitter. If you are in an oversubscribed area it's hell and may well stay that way for months. Some VM peering links are run very hot indeed - sometimes into packet loss territory.

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

You summed up my experience absolutely identically in both of my houses.

My latest experience with virgin was the super hub that needed daily reboots and was a general nightmare. Virgin were convinced that this could not be the issue and 5 engineers or so later let me go. I have to say that even in modem only mode it's a piece of junk.

Other property there was absolutely insane packet loss which meant the internet was unusable entirely.

Both connections were absolutely great WHEN they worked.
Traffic management never bothered me too much they're very upfront about this.

With virgin when things work it's brilliant although their hardware such as the super hub is setting you up for failure.

If the users in a fibre area then go for infinity, sky or another provider. It's a no brainer. Otherwise VM is a good idea for high speed.

Some people seem to have had bad experiences with Virgin - and remain very vocal in their views. If VM was as bad as some make out, they would have no customers.

I started with Bradford Cable many years ago and have gone through many years of good service, only the occasional blip. The worst was 10 days of slow speed due to a problem they found hard to track down.

I'm not greedy, demanding unlimited/uncapped access, and I am a happy customer. Not quite as rare as some would have you think. I have TV M, BB L and Phone L, which suits me fine.

I don't suffer reduced speeds because neighbours are downloading P2P stuff, it's a constant and solid speed 24/7. I don't work for VM, they're not paying me to say this - but I'm happy to do so

There's only one thing I could fault them on - on-demand picture quality, often pixelates. Told this is down to demand and available bandwidth, may improve in the future - but hasn't made me call Sky or any of the others.

I could jump to BT or DigitalRegion for similar costs for phone/BB, but would then lose TV - may as well stay as I am...

Just to balance my previous post. My sister has virgin media for around 5 years. Not one single issue. She doesn't have the superhub though and I think this is responsible for a few issues.

& a neighbour had an unsecured virgin connection for about 10 years. Every time my laptop accidentally connected to it over mine it always worked fine. I sometimes wouldn't realise for about 5 hours that my laptop had gone on the wrong one! Really naughty but an honest mistake.

I've not had a great experience but to be honest on the first occasion I gave them no chance to resolve things and just left. 2nd time around I did give them chance but absolutely everyone in this area moans and moans and moans about virgin. I don't have a friend around here who hasn't had at least a few free months on virgin this year. It's commonly bad around here probably due to massive student take up.

The network is built up of telewest, blueyonder etc etc. So some parts of the network are far better than others.