We were happy Virgin Media customers for 10 years in our previous house, but moved house on 31 July. VM told us they could provide telephone, TV and broadband in our new house and gave us a date of 1 August for installation. They didn't turn up, but we received a letter in the post the following day cancelling the appointment. Since then, we've had four more appointments for installation, for which either an engineer hasn't turned up or they've been cancelled at short notice. We've taken time off work and juggled childcare and other commitments each time. Eventually they told us that part of the pavement and road outside our house needed to be dug up to lay the cables, and this was the responsibility of the 'major works' dept or something similar. No one was able to tell us when or if this work could be carried out. Over the course of many, many phone calls, customer services were rude, aggressive and put the phone down on us on several occasions. Last week we decided to switch to BT - reluctantly because dh works from home several days a week and would much prefer to have the broadband speed VM offer to upload and download large files. BT have given us an installation date of 20 Sept, but when we checked on the progress of our order online yesterday, we found it had been cancelled. We eventually discovered that the order was cancelled because VM had refused to release our previous landline number (we were keen to keep it because it's the one we've had for years and is on dh business cards etc.). Does anyone have any advice for us now? Are VM likely to reallocate our number to someone else or can we demand that they release it to us? We've had no landline or broadband for nearly 6 weeks now and are reaching the end of our tether.