The Grief From Being A Virgin Media Customer

With their funky logo, cute sounding call attendant, fancy advertising and millions of vans out on the road you’d think that Virgin Media were a good company to be with.

Oh how wrong you are.

Here’s a little story of my experience with Virgin Media. Sit tight, get yourself comfortable because this isn’t nice.

Background

In mid 2004 I took out NTL broadband through a cable modem. I never had any issues with it until 6 months ago, following on from the takeover by Virgin Media.

The connection was unstable, they started heavily capping their broadband service and I never got anywhere near the speeds they advertised, unless I happened to be using the PC at 4am in the morning. I’m actually shocked to say, my Orange Broadband service is 100 times better than that of Virgin Media.

My Problem

In January 2009, the service started going all over the place, and was up and down more than a tart’s knickers. I contacted Virgin Media who said they couldn’t discuss the account with me because my address didn’t match the details on their system. It’s my account and I pay them every month without fail.

Upon speaking to Customer Services, they had somehow set the account address as a house 4 doors up from the house where my service is.

I gave them the correct address and they assured me they’d changed it to the correct address.

Throughout the month of February 2009, the service was still all over the place and so intermittent, the only time you could be likely to be able to use it was the very early hours of the morning 3am-5am. Things came to a head on 16th February when things hadn’t improved, so I contacted Broadband Support again. I’d done all of the unplugging, plugging back in, watching lights etc etc and nothing worked.

Their answer was that it was due to anti-virus software and firewalls on the laptop and PC. When I explained that there was also an internet radio which couldn’t get a connection, they told me the same. That it was a fault my end.

They then told me that the service was down in my area.

On the 22nd February, there was still no service, so I contacted them again and was told that there was no problem with the equipment and it must be a problem my end. On speaking to a Manager, I was told that there were service issues in my area and guaranteed that the service would be back by midday the next day. (Quite why the first operator couldn’t see that I’ll never know. The Manager said that the outage was showing on everybody’s screens?)

The next day at 7pm, I tried to access various websites and couldn’t. The lights on the cable modem were all over the place, then static, then all over the place again, and then static. Still I couldn’t get any connection.

On Sunday 1st March, I tried the service again.

Nothing.

So I phoned Broadband Support again.

After over 30 minutes on the phone, the operator told me that I was suffering from a 40% packet loss and said she’d send me an engineer round to have a look at the equipment. The appointment was set for between 4pm and 7pm today (2nd March).

On looking at the cable modem today, the RDY light was flashing like a disco light and the SYNC light had packed up. I left it was it was for the engineer to look at when he arrived.

The only problem being, he didn’t arrive.

10 minutes after the cut off time, I phoned Virgin Media again.  I was told  the engineer had updated the call log that there was no reply from the customer. Even though I’d been sitting there waiting from 3pm, just in case he was early.

The reason was soon confirmed.

He’d gone to the address 4 doors up, because Customer Services hadn’t corrected the address like they were supposed to in January.

I was offered a £10 credit for a no-show by the engineer, followed up with the comment that “Virgin Media were only partly to blame”.  (Considering that it was their administrative failure that had caused the engineer to go to the wrong address, I hastily reinforced that it was completely their fault).

I then had to speak to Customer Services again, to get the address corrected.  They said I needed to go back to Broadband Support and would put me through. They put me through ok, but to the wrong department. So I ended up speaking to somebody in TV Support who didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. He put me through to Broadband Support who said an engineer had updated that he would be at the house in the next 5-10 minutes.

The drawback with that was he’d updated it at 6.40pm and the time was now 7.45pm.

In the end had to ask for a call back from a manager.

The manager called me at just after 9pm.

Customer Services still hadn’t updated the address and so she said she’d have to call me back.

Eventually I got another call back making another appointment for between 12pm and 4pm tomorrow (3rd March).

Meanwhile, the broadband still isn’t working, the RDY light is still performing some disco light show and I’m still paying for the service.

We’ll just wait and see what happens tomorrow.

So, if you’re thinking of becoming a Virgin Media Broadband customer, quite frankly I wouldn’t bother.

Their service is unreliable, customer services are well and truly crap and if you have a problem, nobody is willing to take ownership. All you’re given is the scripted “I’m very sorry to hear that you’re having problems” bullshit.

Update 3rd March

Well, the Virgin Media engineer turned up and within 5 minutes had diagnosed the fault as being the cable modem. He replaced it with a new one.

So it seems that after 2 weeks of arguing with Virgin Media, I was right, they were wrong.

Everything works perfectly now.

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