VIRGIN BASTARD MEDIA.

[Justmuddlingalong]

17 days and counting trying to sort out an upgrade order for TV BB and phone. Why do we have to chase up problems? Why do they never actually sort out the problem. Why is it impossible to escalate your complaint and speak to someone who will do something productive. Why do they advertise services when they can't fulfill them. Why are they so shite in general. Paranoia is setting in here, thinking they must just be taking the piss because surely nobody's so oblivious to how bad their service has been and yet they offer you a tenner off your bill as a "gesture of goodwill" rather that sorting it out or putting you in contact with someone who actually bastarding will. 🤯

I have 22 tests from them about our broadband being faulty since 30th October. Each one moves the repair date back a few days

Spent hours of the phone

They are crap

Oh yes op I feel your pain but sadly theres is the only internet that let's all 5 of us connect and be able to use it. I did find 1 normal person working for them (who actually understood why I was pissed off they were billing me for a month after I left and actually processed a refund) I told her good luck shes going to need it.

Virgin Media and TalkTalk are consistently in the bottom 3 of consumer ratings by Which? We used to use TalkTalk. After a traumatic customer service experience which involved the family having to access the internet via mobile phone for 6 weeks over Christmas (expensive! annoying!) it will be a cold day in hell before we go back there. TalkTalk also excelled themselves while we were unfortunate enough to be their customers by getting hacked and having all their customer details leaked. I think we have finally managed to get all the consequent scammer numbers blocked.

PlusNet are consistently towards the top of the more bog-standard providers. I switched to them from TalkTalk and have been happy - no plans to change. We had an issue. They sorted it without drama.

The top end is Zen Internet - they get rated top in every category by Which? - if I had some reason to place a really high emphasis on the quality of my broadband, I guess I'd go for them.

I can vouch for Zen - English call centres staffed with engineers and consistent internet and landline service. I still have Sky TV but binned off their internet as it kept dropping out every day.

They are appalling

Made a CEO complaint and still not dealt with.

Avoid at all costs

@Eleganz

I’ve used BT and Sky, and whilst neither are cheap, I’ve never had any problems with them.

You've been lucky, that's all. It is like a roll of a dice everytime with these companies, just like other utilities.

We switched to sky from BT in January. The service was so appalling we cancelled within 14 days and went back to BT.

All was fine until two months ago when we suddenly stopped getting any upload speed. This means that DH has an almost impossible time working from home as he can barely send an email, our smart devices suddenly aren't because they also rely on upload to do simple things like turn on a lamp.

The third engineer came last week. Proudly said he'd fixed it and left. He really hadn't and now our phone line is so crackly it's almost unusable. Meanwhile the new router they didn't even tell us they were sending has arrived. It's changed nothing.

DH has now sought out the CEO Email and sent a log of data showing how unusable his all is and telling them to either fix it or cancel the contract. We'll see what that brings. I honestly would try virgin right now over this shit show.

Absolute shit they are. @Justmuddlingalong YANBU.

We had them from the mid to late 1990s, when they took over telewest communications, and they were OK for the first decade I would say. Then from around 2008, they started to get really poor. The service was off more than on, we waited half an hour or more to get through to someone, and would often wait a week for an engineer to come out if it couldn't be fixed over the phone.

We lost our TV channels too as we had the TV with them as well. Sometimes we lost our landline too. We had a mobile phone, but it was PAYG, (which was expensive at the time,) and a 30 minute wait for them would cost a tenner of phone credit!

I wanted to move to someone else for 4 or 5 years, but DH kept refusing which really fucked me off. They got worse and worse, and by 2012, the bill for internet, TV, and landline phone was around £80 a month, and it wasn't even including film or sports channels.

We moved to a rural area in 2014, and PRAISE BE, Virgin aren't up here. And they say they never WILL be, as the population is so low. So we were forced to go with someone else. Picked PLUSNET. 6 years on and we have got not one single complaint.

Only went down once, a few weeks after we got here. The BT lines were so old, that we were struggling to get any speed on the internet. So we called them and they came out 2 days later, and said the old BT lines needed them replacing. So they replaced them (free of charge!) and we were without internet and phone for 3 hours. No problems since ... ever.

We currently pay £33 a month for super fast broadband internet, and our landline, with a call plan that gives us unlimited landline calls, and 500 minutes to mobiles. And we have freesat TV, and netflix. Freesat was a one-off payment of £200 which we paid 5 years ago, and netflix is £7 a month.

I would NEVER go back to Virgin Media. They are AWFUL.

Having a nightmare with our Plusnet broadband connection at the moment - wouldn't recommend, customer service is shocking

Virgin are utter shite.

I switched from them to talk talk last year and so far I've been really impressed. Refunded a bill when I had issues with my connection during that month. Have managed to work from home through the pandemic including delivering live lectures with video.

Plus, they are a hell of a lot cheaper.

I've been trying to CANCEL my contract with them for 4 days now.

Moving somewhere they don't service so need to cancel.

Only way to do it is over phone

On hold 45 mins then disconnected

Get transferred from dept to dept then get disconnected

Ad Infinitum

Their service was shite when we had it installed as well. Engineer turned up 30 mins before slot (we were put), gave us one phone call and that was it. He was unreachable for the rest of the day until I finally spoke to him at about 8pm (after calling numerous managers out of their day off) and he gave me an earful because we weren't at home BECAUSE HE WAS EARLY. Had to go two weeks without internet because of this lazy scumbag and virgin absolutely couldn't get it installed any sooner.

We had the same issue, they kept saying we needed a new box, no just upgrade the channels. I feel awful saying this but it was only when DH actually spoke to a British customer service agent that we finally got it sorted in 5 minutes. He just reset our account and all the channels appeared then our broadband went wonky for a few minutes and came back super fast. The Indian call centre people just couldn’t grasp that we are existing customers, we have upgraded but the extra channels are not on our TiVo yet.

Sky used to be amazing 20 years ago

They have appalling service. Apparently cheap deals that they can't deliver. Never again!

Yes, long waits to speak to customer 'service ' (what service?) then getting cut off.

After about 15 years of Virgin, this year my New Year’s resolution was to finally get rid. I had tried to leave before, but this time I decided that they couldn’t pay me to stay. I dedicated some time to the inevitable frustrating phone calls on a cold wet day in February. I felt oddly exhilarated when I very calmly listed four reasons why I was leaving. They put up a good fight, but I persevered, and ignored their daily retention calls.
I moved to Zen - the transition did result in some problems but crucially they were easy to get hold of, apologised and gave me some money off without me having to complain.
Apparently my new setup is much slower and old fashioned than Virgin: I have had far fewer problems, especially when we’ve all been hammering the broadband the last 8 months. We never achieved the service that Virgin promised, I’m glad to be rid of them.

I was up until recently with Virgin for 19 years, NTL before that. Never had a problem with them, everything great, except when they push the prices up. Last year we didn’t have internet for over two weeks and that tipped me over the edge as they were more than useless. We lost internet again in November, this time for the whole entire month. I live in a town, so not the middle of nowhere.
We’ve just recently moved to Sky, so far so good 👌🏻 I’m awaiting on a refund on the internet. Actually, they’re charging me for next month, so I’m going to cancel my DD with them before they take the money. Useless c@@@s. I’m sure they’re on self sabotage mode.

We re contracted in aug/September for £36.50 for same products. Every month since then I have had to call as our bill is £54. Every time I'm told I was given a wrong offer/offer wasn't out through properly etc and they will sort it. Last time they tried to resell me a new contract for £48. I made it clear I had already had a new contract and would not be paying more than £36.50 a month. I am waiting with baited breath to see if next bill is correct.

I forgot about the retention team bombarding me with calls, slagging off the speeds Plusnet would be able to supply, promising amazingly cheap deals. In the final call the agent rudely hung up on me when I refused to budge.

I also forgot that when the internet had gone down and I spent ages holding trying to get it fixed, only the TV was connected to the internet, tablet and phone still couldn't connect. The agent said he would put me through to their tech team who would help with that BUT there would be a charge. He didn't know how much it would be but apparently they charge per device!

Oh no I've just switched to them as they are the only provider that offer speeds above 2gb/s in my area. I hope I never have an issue and have to contact them

They are abysmal. We have had huge issues over months. However, we have now bought an Asus (I think) router, put the VM router into modem mode and we are now, consistently, getting our promised 200 mbps during the day (drops a bit evenings and weekends) but all 6 of us can now be in separate rooms and streaming stuff (should we so wish).

I did write to the CEO to complain about 3 weeks ago (after spending hours and hours and hours) trying to sort it out. I havent had a response.

Why the paranoia op?

Get on twitter, OP. When my phone didn't work for months and virgin kept saying it was fine or they had fixed it. I had a rant on Twitter and it was fixed in a couple of days with an apology.

When I moved house with no virgin available they told me that was my problem and u still had to finish the contract. I had been with them over 10 years tossers. Thankfully I only had a couple of months left in contract. They are an awful, massively over priced bunch of wankers.

I've been with plusnet now for years and their customer service has so far been great. And my bill is a fraction of what it was.

It took me a month and 18 calls to end a contract each time being held in the queue up to an hour before speaking to a person who ultimately couldn’t help. I’ll be cancelling my controls soon as they come to the end of their terms.

I've been with NTL then Virgin Media for over 20 years in two houses.

If you can circumvent the call centre, you can get them to do things, but it has become increasingly difficult to do so. For example, I used to use their community forum and things would get done. But then they stopped their people being able to do anything useful and would refer you back to the call centre (though maybe that has changed again during covid).

Ditto Twitter - you could tweet them and they'd sort out your problem but then they said they didn't have access to customer accounts.

So you'd phone and get someone who was reading from a script and couldn't speak English very well. And if you did get someone good, they'd not be able to call out an engineer because the system was down.

It is an absolute shambles of a company. Fortunately most of the time it works. But the price goes up unrelentingly.

We have a second line with Plusnet and they are a joy to deal with.

My grandfather in law has been without a working phone line since feb. He's 89, had cancer and we're in the middle of a pandemic. We don't dare cancel as the broadband works and that's his only way to contact anyone. We have tried everything. They are meant to be coming today to install a new cable. Bets on them turning up?!