Is virgin media broadband terrible?

[Springisnear4]

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

When their service is up it can be good, but when it goes down it can go down for weeks.

So if someone cuts a cable you are absolutely screwed as it takes weeks for them to fix it.

Due to were I live in London until about a year ago the only fast broadband I could get is Virgin so I have been stuck with them for over a decade.

Them because I work from home a lot I had to get a slow cheap back up on my BT line. Luckily I did as there have been days up to 8 weeks where their service has been down. Other people I know have had to find a family member's or friend's house to work in if they can't go into the office.

Oh and I have had to threaten them with Court twice due to not giving me money back they owe me. All they had to do was take it off my bill but as none of the customer service staff can take ownership of problems you have to go to the top.

Ours is excellent. Make sure you ask for an up to date router every few years.

IT professional - I've been with virgin for years, as their speeds have generally been far superior to what anyone else can give me.

Their WiFi/super hub has never been much cop, but that's kinda normal for ISP supplied kit as far as I'm concerned and I always put the hub into "modem mode" and use 3rd party router and access points.

Their service has been generally quite good, can't remember the last unscheduled outage. However I intend to leave once my contract is up as there's a local supplier doing better speed for less money. Will see how that goes!

The hilarious part is that the companies themselves don't give a damn - Virgin bought our ISP, so they unilaterally changed our contracts (both term and the exit criteria) and said "Yep, good luck".

Their customer service is terrible but their broadband is excellent.
DH works in IT and fast broadband is important for him.

Virgin media have zero customer service, their broadband is shockingly bad after your initial introduction honeymoon period. They will however send you text messages that you can't reply too, telling you how fantastic they are. If you have the patience of a saint and manage to source a contact number at virgin media, navigate all it's pre recorded options telling you to go to their website, and actually get through after many frustrating hours over many days or weeks of trying, you will end up speaking to Nelly from Deli who learnt her English off the telly. Nelly's only purpose is to ask you a range of random security questions, after which she will either cut you off or pass you back into the call queue which will terminate your call after half an hour or so. The icing on this cake is that this flagship level of service will only cost you £60pm and rise in cost rapidly thereafter.

Their customer service is based in a different country.

Lots of companies - IT, retail and financial - haven't used India for a whild now as it's "too expensive". (Plus customer financial information has landed up in the wrong hands which is why some financial companies have reverted back to UK based call centers.)

One thing I would say with Virgin is when their telephone customer service don't action what you have agreed write a snail mail letter using recorded delivery telling them exactly what was agreed and reminding them of their ombudsman. As they either do everything or ignore you if they do the latter take them to the ombudsman.

Also report them to OFCOM to help with "monitoring" - ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/SitesFormCCTMonitoring

That's great advice. No complaints about the actual broadband and an engineer call out was easy to arrange, attended on time, pleasant employee. All good. But trying to phone to speak about your account is a journey to hell. Eventually, I took advice from a poster on MN and cancelled my payment. That worked as they then called me.

Looks good from the outside but once you are in you will eventually have to deal with them on the phone to an unknown country reading from a script.
I've been talking to them for 4 month and now with the OMBUDSMAN service who are dealing with them

They will offer you loads only if you terminate your contract

Tell me about it. $ months and with the Ombudsman

Same for me
Now at SKY and they listen when you call them