Is virgin media broadband terrible?

[Springisnear4]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

@MargaretThursday my email is still an ntlworld.com 🤣

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.

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

So is mine!

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.

Ours was awful. Used to have outages at least once a fortnight for anything from 1 hour to 2 days. I work from home so was a nightmare. Whenever we called them they'd just say they would get to it within 48 hours. Swapped to Sky and I think we've had 1 outage in 4 years.

Their customer service is diabolical if there is a problem. We used to have issues but after I wrote directly to the CEO with the litany of issues, they sent someone out who upgraded the router and moved some of the wiring. We also moved to a mesh system, and now consistently get 200mbps throughout the house (and we have four teens).

Dreadful and their customer service is non-existent.

Depends where you are. We've had virgin for years and no issues.

That said, I’d don’t know why the government haven’t legislated to ensure that all contracts of this kind are as easy to cancel as they are to set up

They are, there's legislation passing through parliament at the moment.

BUT

it only applies to new contracts
it only applies from spring 2026
all the companies are lobbying hard to get the legislation watered down
and it doesn't apply to contracts regulated by Ofcom, so doesn't apply to Virgin Media anyway :(

If you are out of contract can't you just cancel the DD?

I’m with virgin. In Central Scotland. Service is terrible, and customer service even worse. Only a small number of providers and all terrible, so loath to change supplier yet again, but I loath virgin with a passion, lol.

It's the only company I've ever had broadband with, since 2002. Never had any issues.

I think I've been put off it now, from this thread their customer service seems terrible. Back to the drawing board 🙈

They are absolutely awful in my area. Always having problems. Thankfully I've never signed up with them myself.

So completely pointless then. Because companies would rather scam people and profit off it being so bloody hard to cancel things and MPs would rather consumers are fucked over than corporations.

I have absolutely no faith in parliament either. Or ofcom.

Expensive (despite me threatening to leave and them cutting down our package etc) but I've WFH for 4 years now and can think of only one occasion we had no Internet for an extended period [about 4 hours!!]. The actual service is excellent but it's not cheap for us.

We’ve had Virgin broadband for 3.5 years as it wired into our new build. The broadband itself is fab, no issues at all. However the customer service is awful, they have messed up our deal at each renewal point and last time it took us 5hrs on the phone to resolve.
Im certain they do this on purpose and hope that people get fed up of chasing them and get stuck on the higher prices.