Is virgin media broadband terrible?

[Springisnear4]

The deals are good, the reviews are terrible. Does anyone have broadband with virgin media and can advise?

Virgin were awful for us in SE London. As previous posters have said, check with neighbours, or maybe local Facebook groups to see how others are find it.
We had a lot of outages and I found the customer service utterly contemptuous. I was frequently on hold for over half an hour and the staff were so rude and unhelpful. Once we had a problem that required an engineer and the only reason we were able to get an appointment was because I handed the phone to my husband and they listened to him saying what I'd been trying to explain to them instead of talking over him.. presumably because he is a man? 😬
We are with Sky now and it's been better for us. Customer service is much more pleasant to deal with.

Agree with this. Our TV service isn't working. They have been absolutely crap customer service wise. DH thinks we should get a firestick and go virgin broadband only, but I think we should ditch them completely. No point rewarding crappy service. They offered us £10 compensation for 3 months without on demand services. When we said we wanted to cancel the TV they said ' Well your broadband bill will go up and you're tied to the contract for 2 months'. Even though they have not provided us with the service they couldn't care less.

We had an unusual situation where our cable was cut during extensive street works. It took 3 months to get them to fix it, they lied constantly that "someone would fix it this week". We threatened legal action in the end.

The "automatic compensation" due to loss of service is a crock of shit. They owed us £730, offered £200 as a gesture of goodwill. We had to go through the ombudsman, another 3 months to get paid out.

However, the fibre is really good here so we are stuck. The speed is great.

Once we had a problem that required an engineer and the only reason we were able to get an appointment was because I handed the phone to my husband and they listened to him saying what I'd been trying to explain to them instead of talking over him.. presumably because he is a man?

OMG! I cancelled my phone contract with them because of this! It has become a running joke in our family that they wouldn't talk to me about my own phone until I had the permission of my husband! The kids whenever they moaned to me about the TV, I would say ' I'm just a lickle woman. You have to ask the man of the house to sort it out!'

AVOID X 1000000000000000
When things go wrong you literally cannot get through to them. My reviewer name in many sites is IHATEVIRGINMEDIA

Ours is excellent, it has been down twice for about ten minutes in four years of living here. But I know people who have had terribly problems so I think depends on where you live.

I left them after years because the prices just went up and up and up and the frequency of service interruptions also went up and up.

When it works it's good (but very expensive after the first deal runs out) but far too many interruptions for me

with sky, as with Virgin, if you tell them you’re leaving, they’ll somehow find a much cheaper deal.

At one point years ago, I had them calling me offering me 6 months entirely free tv including sport (which I’d never used) and movies to try to retain me. It was nuts. The offer kept getting cheaper until it was free. I still cancelled because I had decided to ditch live tv entirely and free sky still required me to pay for a tv license.

Oh yes - the leaving process was very difficult, drawn out and generally awful. Hours on the bloody phone.

It's excellent where I am and I've been with them since they started out. On the few occasions it's gone down it has been sorted really quickly.

Customer service is nothing short of horrendous IMHO.

I switch between virgin and BT, depending on who is going to give me the best deal.
I've never had a problem with either.
I'm currently with virgin again and it's been problem free as usual.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 end of that conversation.

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.

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!

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 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'