| # | Name | Comments |
|---|
| 151 | Bob Wallace | On each occasion of the claimed upgrade of Internet speed (from 1MB to 4 MB; 4 MB to 10 MB and now 10MB to 20 MB) the actual functionality of the service (download speeds) seem to get slower. The most recent upgrade to 20 MB leaves something to be desired. In some cases it's simply not worth the bother because the download speed is slower than a dial up service. Even the NTL/Virgin Media Home Page takes an age to open and most of the home page links do not work.
Virgin Media personnel seem to have developed the art of apologising for the poor service but nothing seems to done about it...........and yes I am still paying a premium rate for the service. I get lots of promises of proposed improvements but I have yet to see anything meaningful. Virgin Media seem to prioritise the Marketing and Promotion of their product and service above the actual delivery process which is currently poor. It is getting beyond a joke.
Don't even start me off on the High Definition service and the confounded V+ Box. With the exception of BBC HD, Where exactly is the Virgin Media High Definition |
| 152 | Anonymous | I think the speed cap is absolutly ridiculas, ive allways thought of blueyonder as being a quality provider, but since virgin have took over its totaly gone to pieces in my opinion. |
| 153 | Steven Johnson | I am appauled by the lack of speed I have been receiving of late through VM, and to top it all off they are now traffic shaping. I'm not against traffic shaping but the limits are ridiculous. |
| 154 | Anonymous | As a website designer and seo services provider, I spend an extensive amount of time online, often working into the early hours to cater to overseas clients, plus require the service to be able to enable large website backups to my home office server on a nightly basis.
After being a relatively satisfied long term Telewest/blueyonder landline / internet service customer and virgin mobile / dial up internet customer for several years, I was initially interested to see that Virgin Media was taking over the service and looked forward to what the new consolidation would bring.
To my dismay, within a month of Virgins takeover I noticed issues with connection throughout the course of the day. As the downtime and connection issues appeared to esculate I became increasingly concerned and contacted them regarding the problem. Their response was to provide me with a link to the modem and a new set of figures to input. When asked why this had not been provided with the equipment I was told the information was only given out on a 'need to know' basis. Pretty integral information in my opinion!
This resolved the issue very briefly as the service deteriorated further until the backups to my home office server started to fail on a regular basis and I was having to use their 1p a minute dial up service to connect to the internet as my broadband connection had become a complete joke. The customer service staff appeared to have little knowledge or advice other than the standard 'we'll send out an engineer for which you will be charged if no issue is found.'. Declining their offer, I requested a check run by my server technician who reported that Virgin's DNS servers and/or their server/datahouse was offline or unobtainable at the time of backup requests.
Armed with this information I contacted Virgin again and after going through several customer support personnell (one of whom thought I'd have to hack into their system to find out about their dns servers) I finally spoke to an upper grade technician who not only confirmed our findings but also reluctantly informed me that their servers would be undergoing downtime and capping for maintenance/upgrading for some considerable time. After a long discussion regarding the issues as they pertained to my particular circumstances he also agreed that the only option I had would be to move to another provider.
My next call to Virgin support was to request transfer of my telephone number to BT and cancel my services. At the time their advertising stated 'love us or your money back' which I quoted during the phone conversation along with the previous discussions and requested that the charges for my internet service be removed from my final bill back to February which she agreed to do.
Imagine my suprise on receiving my final bill which had not been reduced in any way! On contacting their accounts department I was informed they had no record of any deduction even though they did have a record of the transfer request and complaint. Their response was to deduct the bill from my bank account. As a business account holder, I was able to instruct the bank to claw back the funds and am now going through the dispute process. (wish me luck folks!). |
| 155 | Robert Elliott | £200 odd bill came through this morning, for my "VIP" package, when i'm receiving 3mb, instead of 20, Sky Movies all repeat themselves, and have a wider choice of movies on the internet. Not happy.
Sick of disconnections, over charging etc. And unfortunately, they roped me into another 12 month contract because i've moved house, but they failed to tell me this... Methinks Sky will take over my TV, and BT and Be can do my phoneline and internet. Not happy!!! |
| 156 | Hilary Bancroft | My problem with VM is my bill is always 2 or 3 days late because I get paid every 28 days, with NTL this was not a probem as they knew they would get the money, since VM took over they charge me £10 for being a late payer, but this month I was late again and I got phone calls at 9pm making threts to cut me off and I said I would pay it when I get my wage as usual and gave them a date, 2 days later I went to pay the bill but was taken ill on way to pay, I ended up in hospital as I had a Heart Attack so bill is still not paid, I have had thretening letters late night phone call from VM and when I tell them by phone, email or letter that I am house bound after a Heart Attack they still don't care, they have cut my service down NO TV Incoming call onlyon phone and at a time when I need it most and all because I owe them £60 I told them to cut me off altogether, they wont do that till i pay the bill and £100 as security in case of late payment, I cant afford the £100 and don't see why I should pay this any way, if they cant understand that I have good reason for not paying my bill on time then god only knows what would be a good enough reason, the thing is they are gharging me full price for half a service now and I am stuck, I cant afford to pay what they want and they wont cut me off, so I cant even go to BT.
If you want people to sign go to this link and ask these people down the page to sign it because they are mad with VM also. PS MY trouble relates to VM/NTL |
| 157 | A WILLIAMS | Crap service all the way |
| 158 | Jim Cummings | When will large U.K. companies realise they are only as big as their customer base. 45000 dissatisfied "Punters" have left Virgin Media this year.What ever happened to the saying "you get what you pay for". £25 per month seems just a little steep for 56k download speeds.I am sick to the back teeth of companies like Virgin moving the goal posts when ever they feel like it. Dose the term "contract" mean nothing in the U.K. |
| 159 | Dan | Signing because of the same reasons as everyone else, appauling speed and appaluing behaviour from the virgin team. Phoned their 25p a minute line for them to tell me to run a speed test, not advising me what to do after , to add salt to the wounds, the speedtest doesnt even work! |
| 160 | mike | speeds are up and down, mainly down. fair useage policy dosent come in to this as its after the 12 oclock time frame. pissed off with all the bull shit blueyonder (virgin) come out with. |
| 161 | simon holland | aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!
virgin media are a complete waste of time we have not had a bill for 6 months and they keep threatening to cut us off and take us to court the problem is we are suppose to pay a total of £39 per month all calls included and yet for a 2 month period the bill is £163 not including the £36 for the internet we've asked them to cut us off they won't. not untill we've paid the bill we don't agree with. my wife spent 3 and a half hours on the phone to the idiots this morning and still no progress. so there is nothing i can do except TAKE THEM TO COURT!! (again aaaaaaaarrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!) |
| 162 | thomas keary | Every aspect of the company has degraded since NTL became VM. Calling customer support results in one dept calling the other dept a liar, even though the lying dept (allegedly) had information they could only get if it was true. Odds of guessing this info. Astronomical. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000-1. Second high call rate India dept accepts these odds in favour of claiming the 1st dept did not recieve a payment they relayed time and date and bank number of payment. Been 11 days waiting for email response to get services back on. £15+ on mobile first time to try sort this. Cant afford to do this again, I should have a landline to make these calls. Me + 20 friends moving to DSL+. Are printing flyers of the worst forum comments, about 20,000 and posting them through doors on wekends to warn people not to join when a rep comes with a package (of lies). I cost Connect3D £37,000 last year for failing to honour a warranty. This year Virgin Media is my target and I will use every tactic, fair and underhanded to make thousands aware of what to "REALLY" expect. When the sales rep is spotted the building will be targeted at the same time he does. Virgin Media will die in Glasgow South side I promise this. Friends have ties to over 300 websites. All promise negative VirginMedia articles and adverts on their home page. |
| 163 | Anonymous | COMPLETLY BEMUSE BY VIRGIN NTL CEO AND COMPLAINTS SYSTEM. A TOTAL PIECE OF CR*P. PLEASE NTL, VIRGIN MEDIA FOR GOD SUCK CLOSE YOUR BUSINESS YOU DON'T CAR ABOUT THE CUSTOMERS NOR OFCOM NOR THE COURTS. AS A GLASGOW SENIOR MANAGER TOLD ME HE WOULD NOT HONOUR THE VIRGIN MEDIA CONTRACT AS IT WAS SIGNED OFF AS FREE BY A SENIOR AREA MANAGER. THE SNIOR MANAGER HAS BEEN SACKED FOR SWEARING AT ME ON THE PHONE IN AN THREATNING BEHAIOUR MORE UNBLEIVEABLE STORIED TO TELL ..... CUERRENTLY GOING BACK TO COURT ... HAS ENOUGH. ANYBODY THINKING ABOUT JOINING UP TO NTL-VIRGIN MEDIA -- DON'T !!!!!!!! |
| 164 | Anonymous | Took me 3 months, an ammassment of 45 letters and sending them all by recorded delivery to the CEO before i could extricate myself from this sub-standard bunch of cowboys. |
| 165 | Anonymous | please advise supporters that v.m. removed over £140 from my bank account using details of card number used when i WAS a customer.Tell them to cancel their cards and make payments by checks or via banks only. from happy new sky customer. |
| 166 | Craig | I HATE VIRGIN MEDIA!
My connection drops often and I get terrible speeds.
They advertise "Unlimited" but you get throttled in the day.
25p /minute for crappy indian tech support! |
| 167 | Chen | BROADBAND !!! BROADBAND !!! BROADBAND!! BROADBAND !!!
UNLIMITED DOWNLOAD!!!!!!! 8 MEG!!! WWOOOOHHHH!!!!
O wait hold on this aint right, i asked for 8 meg.... why is it worst than 56K Dail-up??? and omg look at the Lantency!!!!! the ping is unreal!!!!
now then with this lantency and speed, i cant play online games, i cant really download anything, can have voice chat without being disconnected every min, all i can do is to surf the web, like this great website here which takes about half a min to load up.
Okey... i better give them a call....
Ring Ring...
Hi, welcome to virgin media, my name is Craig, we have this traffic control policy which u have agreed on before joining, we CAPP ur speed in PEAK time (4pm - 3am) because we are OVERLY SUBSCRIBED!!!!!!!!!
So how about the unlimited download?
Err.... just wait one Sec...
*Music comes on for 10 min*
Then i just hunged up.
But even with this peak time policy. i still find my self stuck around from 124k to 1 meg(if u wake up 3am in the morning to check if the peak time is over) and with a ping that is high up in the sky to do anything with.
I Feel strongly that there should be laws against false advertising. |
| 168 | Paul Vickers | Awful, Awful service... I have 'unlimited' 8Meg, and I don't get over 20KBps any time of the day or night, and I regularly get 1- 2KBps speeds. Customer services have hung up on me when I compained, and also told me that it was my fault. This company is a complete FRAUD... and I really hope they get closed down by trading standards!! |
| 169 | Anonymous | Ridiculously slow throughout peak time, High pings, been like this for last 4 months, an absolute nightmare trying to talk to anyone on customer support (not whole truth, 1 of 20 people i talked to was actually a bit helpful). Basically, appaling service, Virgin dont give a toss about their customers; and what infuriates me even moe is how they are advertising that they have 'The fastest Broadband'. I urge you to talk to someone before even thinking of signing for Virgin Broadband. Its just a pile of shit, to put it bluntly |
| 170 | malcolm j spargo | ffirst bill after VM took over from NTL over charged phoned and complained and cancelled contract with effect from 11th Feb 07, continued to be billed for services , threatened with baillfs twice ,spent hours on the phone getting agreemnts only to be brocken by VM. |
| 171 | patrik | the speed is a contradiction,as is the customer service..virgin are money hungry parasites! |
| 172 | Anonymous | Im paying for 8Mb connection but only getting 1Mb if that most of the time. Also my ping is constantly high (250-350) making online gaming impossible. |
| 173 | JUSTIN | The telewest mafia company have made a simple thing become a day to day nightmare. As I write new ideas are being thought of to squeeze more money from telephone customers. Calls per minute, a strange behaving broadband service and very poor customer service. Today I wanted to find out how to check my bill on-line. "Enter India." CS informed me to contact EB tomorrow mourning to find out why my
password did not work allowing access to my E- bill.
When I inquired what EB was my Indian angel repeated carefully Ebay. What, I said, has Ebay got to do with Virgin media ? ... The story continues. |
| 174 | M Kilburn | Oxford Cheat, customs fraudster too! Branson is a crook to the core and we PAY HIM ! |
| 175 | Mick Fitzpatrick | I had a very good service for many years from Telewest/Blueyonder. When NTL took over The problems started. I had regular downtime. then Virgin Media took over and I seem to be lucky if I can go two whole days without downtime. I rely on this service to get work and it is most frustrating to not be able to contact people when I need to. |
| 176 | Mr Sargeant | on 20mg cable yet cant play games or stream ridiculous |
| 177 | Anonymous | i am also writing to advise of how crap the service has become over the last few months, i am an ex employee of TW and for the last few years i have had Broadband with absolutley no hastle at all started with the 512 and continued to upgrade everything was great till i upgraded to the 20Mb service, thats when the poo hit the fan, not only did my service drop my downloads were even slower than when i was on the 4Mb service, obviously i complained to someone in India at least 5 times, i was told my pc's were at fault and so was my router i have 2 pc's (1 XP Pro sp2 1 Vista Ultimate ) and 1 XP laptop sp2 and yes they said all 3 was the problem then they tried to shift the blame to the router saying it was incompatable (WPN824UK) they had the cheek to ask me to do the most lame tests i have ever herd in my life .and charged me nearly £20 in the process for the call i am still paying for a 20Mb service and at times i am getting about 14Mb on a good day but more often than not i am only able to get about 8Mb constantly on http://www.speedtest.net/ to check what DL/UL speeds i am getting. now they have a cheek to introduce a capping policy which i have been told is activated as soon as you DL 3Gb with in Peak hours thats supposed to last a few hours mine seems to stay on for days at a time. any time i call VM i get the same responce from customer service that they are working on the issue, dont know how much more bulls##t i can take from them... |
| 178 | Joanna Duffy | My folks have had cable for about 5 years or so when it used to be Blueyonder and the service was impeccible. Since Virgin Media have taken over the service is quite frankly fu(| |
| 179 | David Morrow | I am absolutely disgusted with the service I have recieved from this shambolic company. After taking nearly 3 months to get my broadband connected in the first place I am just about to move house after 9 months and now have been told I have to renew a 12 month contract or pay £140 cancellation charge. The customer zone website doesnt work so I cant check my bill online and they are to incompetant to send a paper bill after asking for one, I have spent close to £50 on calls since joining, and in some cases when I try to sort out a problem they have no record of my account and I cannot prove that I am a customer., I could go on and on......In short Absolutely disgusted I will tell everyone I know to avoid having any dealings with virgin media. |
| 180 | Chris Harrington | Crappy connection on 20 meg service every evening !
Unable to play online games evening's but runs fine during day.
Tech Support dont give a shit !! |
| 181 | Damien Kaye | Vigin Media are LIARS who suckered me in with false promises and tied me down with an 18 month contract. I am paying on average 100 pounds a month and so far ALL services are falling vastly short!!! |
| 182 | Alan Burgoyne | RIDICULOUSLY low download speeds, around 250KB/s, even when a speed test reports around 15mbps line speed. Too much latency/loss to play online shooters.
When the speed cap comes into play, download speeds are even worse. Maximum of around 50KB/s which is nowhere near the supposed 5mbps.
No downtime, which seems lucky. |
| 183 | Peter Field | Shite, pre-NTL merge Virgin were OK, I work from home and need the higher speeds. I pay for 8Mb and get 200K and dropping weekly. At this rate I might as well give £20 a month to a homeless bloke and get the same broadband service. At least it will do him some good. Aaarrgggh! |
| 184 | Ian Munro | How poor the service has become really makes me want to puke. I'd been happy with Telewest for more than 5 years. It's just awful the way the service has deteriorated. The telephone customer service typifies the change - it's now far worse and costs more!
Switching as soon as I can |
| 185 | Elizabeth Simpson | We live in an apartment block that was served by NTL and cannot receive any TV reception without the aid of, now, Virgin Media. I suspect that NTL removed the standard aerial connection when they originally plumbed in their cable and possibly reset the router so that we cannot get a signal. I have trawled the internet trying to find some way of not having to use Virgin Media and on doing so came across this site. We only have a TV/telephone package but have persistent faults with the TV facility. Virgin Media have no customer service. Their staff are incompetent, rude, argumentative and contradictory. Each call, usually lasting over an hour and a half, entails being passed from one inept person to another with unacceptable intervals placed on hold and never resulting in any satisfactory outcome. Any promises of returned calls or engineer visits never happen. I have never come across a team of customer service personnel that could cause such distrust and anxiety. Letters of complaint are still unacknowledged and our service remains faulty. |
| 186 | Anonymous | I have been a customer of Telewest for several years but VM are total crap.
I find it particularly galling that i have to ring a premium rate phone number to find out that they are at fault for my outages. They think that people who are dissatisfied will be put off phoning because of the prohibitive cost. well, that ploy has worked on me as I am more than reluctant to pick up the phone at 25p per minute. If I do not phone I will not know how much time has been due to their ineptitude or mine. I could go on but it is all so much p***ing in the wind. |
| 187 | John Sloan | I feel misrepresented. I had a powerful stable 10 mg permanently, and i got it too full bandwidth 24/7.
Then as a special offer I get 20mg thinking happy days the future is hear. Alas I'm paying 37 quid for a service worth £9.99 i pretty much have a 4 mg connection if not slower! This is a disgrace, I was never informed about traffic management, and to my horror i found out while trying to download a movie to watch, which i had paid for!
As far as I'm concerned OFCOM is allowing Virgin to get away with Illegal activities without any penalty. I am hoping to move to be internet and sky after all this polava (loyal customer of nearly 10 years)
I understan traffic shaping it is fair that us heavy downloaders get penalisied for ripping the ass out of it BUT 75% WHAT>>>>>>!!!!! Its a joke and if I am reduced to a 5 meg connection I only should pay for a 5 mg connection. |
| 188 | Anonymous | Very frustrating trying to contact someone through their automated system.
Recently when I lost all 3 services e.g. TV,BB and Telephone, the only way I could talk to anyone was by phoning their accounts dept, when that was unsuccessful i bit the bullit and called the broadband support line on my cell phone (my Virgin landline phonenot working) at the rate of 10p connection and 25p/minute thereafter. After spending the grand total of £9.85 all 3 services were back on and running.
As the problems I had was due to them i ventured to ask for a refund for the call from my mobile and as my mobile is pay as you go I am unable to provide a bill to show them the cost.
The technical support service used to be free but since Virgin's take over of Telewest/Bluyonder/NTL (or the re-branding toVirgin Media) they now levy a charge.
I had to use the technical help line again yesterday to once again report "their fault" but this time I was able to use my land line and successfully argued that I should not be billed for the call, time will tell.
I never had any problems when it was Telewest. |
| 189 | Anonymous | Was a happy TW customer. since Virgin took over the service has declined sharply. won't recommand them to others and looking to change suppliers |
| 190 | Anonymous | I have only been with virgin since the 1/10/07,the first day the sppeds were good but ever since then they have fluctuated from about 500kps to 4megs if I am lucky.In the evenings and weekend the speed drops right down to a maximum of 680kps.I don't expect to get 8 megs but I do expect to get a reasonable spped |
| 191 | Kevin Davison | I've been having the exact same problems with Virgin media, slow internet connection and also not having a connection at all. Also I have been having problems downloading emails especially if the file size is quite large lets say 3 meg but when you are supposed to get a 8 meg connection speed it shouldnt matter. I have been on the phone loads of times tring to sort out he connection problem only to be told that the problem wasnt Virgin and I would have to check my own internal wiring (phone Line) having replaced all this it still wasnt any faster, so back again to see what else they wanted me to do. To cut a long story short they eventually agreed when I spoke to one of the Tech support chaps that the problem was in fact with Virgin and that they have signed up far too many folk tp broadband and in particular the BT lines and with contension ratio on the line it was going to be slow I was told at certain times of the day. I get on average 150k speeds which is far too slow to be of any use to me or anyone else.
Kevin Davison (Derby) |
| 192 | Chris | Well what can I say other than NTL should never of sold out to virgin. I like the new cap policy they never told us customers about. And the recent lag spikes are pathetic would they accept customers delaying payment or knocking alittle off i doubt they would so why should we accept it. |
| 193 | viv nelson | my service has been crap from the switch |
| 194 | Anonymous | VM are a total farce! Their customer service is dire! The connection fails on a regular basis and page timeouts are common place (40%) of the time. Never a problem with previous ISP.
Worse still the DG834G router they sell you when you sign up (£40 additional) is a firmware locked variant - which cannot be firmware upgraded or used with another ISP! I NEVER would have bought a locked router knowingly - I am expert with the regular DG834 router, but the VM variant (DG834Gsp) should be leased to the customer and be clearly sold as ISP specific and firmware locked.
For £8 more I could have purchased elsewhere and got the full on PROPER version!
VM is a classic example of how, with successful marketing, big companies can sell us gold-plated turds! |
| 195 | Anonymous | ever since VM took over Blueyonder my download speeds have more than halved and my modem is constantly loosing connection |
| 196 | Anonymous | Never reply to complaints, always told its a "technical fault at my end" that my 20mb bandwidth is at 5mb 95% of the time. |
| 197 | Craig Northway | I am fed up with paying £17.99 a month for 'upto 8mb' broadband and only getting speeds that are equivalent to dial up (256-512kbs). |
| 198 | Anonymous | My connection, since the aquisition of NTL, has drastically reduced in speed and reliability. Previous to the aquisition, it was an excellent connection, up there with, if not better, than other isp's. Very disapointing. |
| 199 | jo cogger | sack.of.shit
customer disservice to a new level
months without correct tv service (now finally fixed)
weeks without broadband (still no service, despite replacement modem)
countless calls, going round in circles, blatant lies, bullshit and fobbing off |
| 200 | Graham | Virgin cancelled our account because they had a new sale at the same address (not really the same address but you get the picture). Since then we've had no service, but they still charging us £74 a month... Customer services support are so bad it's unbelievable, only useful people where the disconnection people... |