To take this further?

[ChickenGoujonDestroyer]

I wouldn't know how or who to take this further with but I'm annoyed and at least need a vent!!

Been with virgin media for 2 years. Price hiked up - renegotiated got a good deal for 10 months now they want to put it up to full price again I.e was £30 per month for basic tv, decent broadband and basic phone now £65.

Cant switch to ANY other provider because the little green box at the end of the road is full. No other providers can fit anything else in the box so we HAVE to stay with virgin or have no tv service (previously had freeview so maybe could go back to that) but more importantly NO internet.

We're being forced to stay with a company and pay (to us) a large bill every month just to have internet. I feel held to ransom (appreciate this is a first world problem but In this day and age internet is like a basic need -the kids need it for homework now!) And unsure what I can do.

I tried to "downgrade" with virgin to just internet but they said we cant? Any tech savvy people let me know the options thank you!!

Cancel and if you are using your details, then sign up using your husbands. Completely new customer. We were going to do that but thankfully they gave us a good deal in the end.

Oh that might be worth looking into instead thanks for that suggestion I'll try that. I'm with EE and they're always on about taking broadband etc maybe they mean dongles but I mis understand and always tell them I'm not able to switch provider! Thanks (by the way I am a complete technophobe so excuse me if I seem thick)

I believe the boxes are owned by BT Openreach. We had something very similar where all of our street apart from 5 houses had superfast broadband and the rest of us had less than 1mb. Be prepared for a fight though and to ask the same question repeatedly until you get an answer. There's a page on their site for network enquiries I think - we started there and were added to a list!

2 years later we finally had the cabinet upgraded but not before they tried to charge the remaining houses 13k for the privilege!

Oh and in the meantime we actually bought a contract unlimited data SIM and used it as a personal hot-spot. It means it acts like a WiFi device. It was £25 from virgin for unlimited everything and was a decent enough stop-gap and you get 3G or 4G speeds depending on your area. You and the kids just connect to it instead of a router. Needs to be switched on and you need an old phone constantly in charging to be able to do it but small price to pay for decent Internet!

You could try vfast (www.vfast.co.uk) which supples wireless internet. We looked into it but sadly our house is in the sticks and over a large hill so the aerial they would have put on our roof wouldn’t have been able to “see” the aerial on the village church two miles away. We wanted to have this and do away with the landline as we all have mobiles so would no longer need it - and we use freesat for TV.

2 years later we finally had the cabinet upgraded but not before they tried to charge the remaining houses 13k for the privilege!

Back in the dark ages of dial up we needed to send "large" files at work that my phone could send now every day so we had to have a T1 connection installed that cost over £100k to link up to the nearest available connection several counties away. The line rental was something like £30K! Then just a couple of years later broadband came along at £30 a month for faster speeds.

@ChickenGoujonDestroyer

The green boxes belong to openreach who provide all the lines for any of the internet providers. You need to contact them to ask when the box will be upgraded etc. Website is @ but shit and I found livechat was the best option to talk to them

Thanks everyone!!