Is virgin media broadband terrible?

I swapped from sky to virgin a couple of years ago, as wifi kept dropping out.
I have fibre optic (is that what it's called?? I'm questioning myself now I've written it down 🤔🤔)
Anyway, the super fast one.
I can't fault it. It costs me a lot (£67) but I will never get rid as the speeds with other providers are literally 2% of virgin speed.
I've never had a problem and am very happy. I just wish it was a bit cheaper.

So is mine!

Ive never used virgin

FTTP fibre to the premise is brilliant as you have fibre right into your house

FTTC Fibre to the cabinet can be trickier, as you say OP. Your house could potentially be right beside the cabinet, but if the cable from cabinet to your house has your house at the v end of the line ie looping to all the other houses first, then your broadband could still be v slow

Really dreadful customer service. I had a couple of years where I dropped the ball due to being busy and they put my contract up to £90 a month. When I eventually got around to contacting to work out a better deal they were awful. I managed to get them down to £28 a month (for broadband only), but the connection has been crappy ever since. I’m now six month away from the end of my current contract so will go elsewhere next time…but really not looking forward to making the calls/emails to do so.

Am I allowed to mention that I find it really difficult to understand the accents of their call centre staff? It makes communication so much harder. They recently called me to try and talk me in to upgrading my contract. Because I couldn’t completely understand the caller, I asked her to send me it in writing to take a look. Turns out they were trying to add on a mobile phone package that I’d already told them I didn’t need. Grrr. I told them to stick it and that I’d go elsewhere at the end of my contract.

@MargaretThursday my email is still an ntlworld.com 🤣

My experience is that when it works, it's fantastic but when it doesn't, it's a nightmare to get through to anyone or to get anyone to come out.

We can't get Virgin where we live now - we have BT and while I'd say it's not as fast as Virgin was, they're much better at fixing problems. We used to be with SKY but they were awful too.

Been with virgin for twenty four years and have always been happy with them. They do great offers to encourage you to stay.

Not if it's a straight replacement of a faulty item I don't think

They've just bought my ISP, a fantastic fibre-to-the-premises company whose products are entirely transitioning to Virgin Media, which means a massive downgrade because of their inferior connections* . The communication has been terrible, and Virgin customer services won't even give me details of what's going to happen to my connection if I stay with them.

Ergo, I'm moving to another ISP who'll guarantee to maintain (and upgrade) my connection.

(*) My current connection is gigabit download and upload, whereas Virgin's max upload is a tenth of that.

Thanks but I also need to renegotiate the amount I pay. I'm out of contract and if I get a new router I think that ties you in again.

When my TV box broke I just booked an engineer online. It was replaced within a few days. I went through the online test thing and, as that didn't fix it, offered me the chance to book an engineer.

I'm paying an eye watering amount for virgin. Had problems lately that I never used to have. Suspect the router is knackered as it has a permanent red light but friends experiences of getting through to customer service were so bad that I haven't braced myself to call them yet. I don't know how you're supposed to do it if you have a job to go to!

Someone else I know switched to Vodafone fibre. Anyone had good experience with them? They offer rival speeds to virgin. I'd never go back to BT.

I found the broadband good when it worked but it did seem to go down quite a lot. The prices increased loads over the years. But mostly I left them because they were lying bastards! There would always be extra charges on things even when I double checked there wouldn't be. When we first joined we were told as previous home owners had virgin we could get it all fitted at no extra cost. Great. Except they charged £25 delivery and somehow seemed to think this wasn't an 'extra cost.'

Then someone from virgin mobile called with a good phone deal. My phone was breaking and the phone sounded like the spec I had been looking for. Except when it arrived it wasn't what they said it was at all. Literally laughed at me when I said they needed to provide a phone with the spec I'd been told for the price agreed. So I cancelled and returned the phone. Did they cancel it? Or course not - still charged me and I had to go through more ball ache getting my money back.

When I finally cancelled the broadband I got absolutely hounded to not cancel - constant phone calls for a month. Even the day before the move. Some patronising wheeler-deeler del boy type manager got on the phone 'come on love, tell me what BT are offering and we can beat it'

Show him my screenshots. And that’s only a small part of it - and doesn’t include the phone calls.

No one wants to deal with such poorly designed customer service processes.

I actually feel bad for their customer service staff who must cringe at having to frustrate and annoy customer with that crap. But they have to follow the process no matter how terrible they are.

I'm going to read this out to DH ( who will be the one wasting his time on this as they won't talk to me!) and tell him to get in on the months notice sharpish!

That looks very familiar, I'd forgotten about the bot interactions. And they wouldn't stop my contract until 30 days after I told them I wanted to cancel. I'm with 3 now - so much better.

The end of that conversation.

We've had them since they took over ntlworld.

I won't say never a problem, which isn't true, but I can say that when there's been a problem, they've been excellent at sorting it.
We had it at the last place I worked and they were a vast improvement on the previous provider.

The WhatsApp experience is worse. And the phone line will try to divert you into it. These screen shots are several DAYS into the process of trying to cancel, and multiple instances of being kicked to the bot, asked for security details, forced through the same question loops.

I had to put in a complaint to cancel. And they refunded me from the day I originally told them I wanted to cancel.

Virgin does seem besieged with issues in my area, maybe some areas are better than others. There is often posts on the local Facebook group asking if others are down (I don't see this for other providers)

We're with Sky, our contract just ended and went up, but DH managed to negotiate. It wasn't just the main call centre though, you have to speak to the retention team.

The actual broadband service is absolutely great.

The CUSTOMER service is abysmal. The worst I've ever experienced. If you get any kind of problem or query, kiss goodbye to half a day.

You spend hours on the phone, going round and round and round, lines cut off, staff who are clearly barely trained in the basics and don't know what to do or day to you so shunt you to someone else.

Also, out of all the global call centres I've ever spoken to, VM is the only company where I've experienced any kind of language barrier/poor level of spoken English. Not accent - I don't care what accent they have - but actual language and lack of understanding which makes conversation very difficult. It's very obvious that VM don't have very high requirements for the level of spoken or conversational English required imo.

Also the equipment they delivered to my DD’s flat was faulty. It took several months and complaint after complaint to get the error fixed. They ended up paying another provider the whole time as Virgin messed them around so much with a Kafkaesque series of events. They were all students and needed the internet.

We changed from it as it was appalling. I was sick of it failing and actually bought a mobile internet thing after it crashed during an online meeting with a judge.

I am in central London. With EE now which is better but still crashes regularly but £20 cheaper.

We've had Virgin Media, and their predecessors, for nearly 30 years. The broadband is generally good but is often intermittent during the night. The Virgin TV and landline packages are very expensive. However, the main problem with Virgin is their customer service, which is the worst, most uncaring, and incompetent of any organisation I have ever come across. Unfortunately for various reasons we don't really have an alternative or else we would have changed years ago.

We just left Virgin because they put their prices up they wanted around £44 per month for broadband. So we left.

Might be worth shopping around for a long term good deal rather than one that goes up.