Experiences of Virgin Media please

[LittleMissNorty]

We are thinking of switching to Virgin Media as we can get everything we have now (telephone, HD TV, sky sports, faster broadband etc) around £20 cheaper a month than Sky.

IME Sky HD boxes are rubbish and always go wrong when just out of warranty then they charge £65 to come out. Virgin don't charge anything for callout or repairs - another big plus.

Am now looking for others experiences of their service, charges and equipment - positive or negative

All comments will be much appreciated! TIA

from my past experience they are mucha muchness

the telephone service is fucking dreadful

i mean FUCKING DREADFUL

you wait for ages tospeak to anyone

anyway - we fucked it all off and dont have telly anymore

you can watch whatever you want on the puter theres no need

Their charges go up yearly buy about £4 without them telling you! Service isn't too bad, equiptment does the job, I don't get sales calls from them.

Virgin are awful.
The broadband is not reliable enough, and faults often take a while to be corrected.
The TV service has also been unavailable more often than I think is reasonable.
Customer services are not great.

Im also annoyed by the inconsistant approach to billing - I recently reviewed my package, and increased it in some areas, and ended up paying less than I was before. Im annoyed that they hadnt automatically decreased my bill when rates fell, as I feel I have been penalised for being a loyal customer.

The only reason that I am with Virgin still is that I dont really have any choice - I dont have a BT line, and I cant have a sattelite dish where I live.

My bills are all over the place. When I joined last year I was paying £20 a month, now they are £28-£32 for no apparant reason, they just seem to get higher.

we have had experience of both Virgin and Sky. Sky were slightly cheaper, but the service was pretty bad - they completely messed up our phone, and it took a few months to sort out! It took ages to get through to anyone. Virgin TV gives a better picture than Sky and the broadband is pretty reliable. I'm not too impressed with either tbh but we're sticking with Virgin now. Custy's option sounds pretty sensible really!

I have had a good experience. There have been a couple of days when the telly hasn't worked which has been annoying, but not the end of the world. I am primarily with them because they are cheaper than Sky and I'm not in a digital area. I get a fantastic deal we pay £25 for telly, phone and broadband. Have never had an issue with phone or broadband. Our box broke once and they set a very nice chap out the next day. Plus you get access to really cheap mobile phone packages, have just signed up to a £8.50 a month deal for 100 mins and 200 texts.

They're mostly okay about repairs and replacements but sometimes they need a kick up the arse bit of persuasion to come out. They like to fob you off with 'but according to our readings it should be fine'.

The only time they've really pissed me off was when I paid to have the broadband upgraded to 20M and haven't had anywhere near that amount. You get a patronising person reminding you that the contract says up to 20M so anything goes. It's an industry-wide problem though so not entirely down to Virgin being shite.

Overall the good outweighs the bad and I'd rather go without than go to Sky.

yes ime the billing is the worst. They don't give loyal customers any discounts you could be entitled to, unless you ring up and threaten to leave once per year. That's why one of my colleagues moved to Sky.

We've had Virgin for broadband/telly/phone for a couple of years now. No problems at all except for the odd blip in reception, which has been quickly sorted out. And you have the added smugness factor of not giving money to Murdoch (should you care about that sort of thing).

yes I forgot you can get a good mobile package if you are a Virgin customer, my dh has this.

Fluffy call them up, I called when I was on mat leave to get rid of broadband, although I was tied in for months and couldn't get rid of the broadband they discounted my bill. Tell them you aren't happy and are thinking about Sky

Thanks - this is great.

Think we may get someone round to do a home visit and give him a really hard time and see what we can get out of them!

We are keen however, not to jump from the frying pan into the fire!

Pretty good. They halved our bill after dh spoke to Retention(?) and it's not increased in 4 years [shhh]. They did damage a bit of brickwork putting in cable but they put it right. Reliable & straightforward service.

Sky, who we were with previously, are abominable.

I'll try that Wonder.

Yes Heated we are still on retention package 2 years later. We had some friends who got loads of extra channels with sky for free for a month, a year later sky noticed and turned them all off. Sometimes ineffieciency is good

crap. slow, crap customer service. the worst customer service i have encountered, other than BT and banks.

If you need to complain they will be rude, they will refuse to escalate calls, they will belittle you. I have often said i think they are primed specifically to wind you up to the point of yelling and screaming at them. i think that is their job.

They have forgotten to take direct debits, then charged me for not paying, then refused to refund, they have removed channels, or added channels.

I have spent more time on their telephone line sorting out problems with service, billing, etc than I care to remember.

I have been given freebies for a 12 month period several times and as such stayed with them.

In the end, I became so frustrated with the service, customer service in particular that I decided to pay Sky instead.

And then, virgin would not let me leave, they kept my telephone line open for months, charged me and tried telling they would take me to court for the money. It took 10 calls, hours on the phone and talking to 3 managers for them to rectify the mistake.

Never, ever ever again.

Have had VM for a couple of years now after massive f**k up by BT/Orange meant I couldn't get broadband on my phoneline.

Had a couple of issues with installation (sending an engineer out just to tell me I needed another engineer to run the cable in - no kidding!?!), but other than that it's been very reliable, just had a half day when tv not working. No broadband problems at all.

Billing wise, you have to keep a check on it but I've had no issues apart from having to cancel paper bills in order to get the lowest price... and monthly amount went up by £2 with no notice.

Otherwise it's been a pretty good experience so far... tonnes better than friends who have sky, tiscali etc.

We have had Virgin Media for years and never really had a problem with the actual service.

What we have had problems wiht is billing. A couple of times, we upgraded our service and apparently this meant getting a new account each time. They transferred over our direct debit to the new account etc, but unfortunately did not close the old one. When it didn't get paid, they shut us off in aan instant - no warning at all. Both times I went ballistic on the phone to them, insisting I speak to the boss etc.

The other thing is not to believe headline rates. You always end up spending loads more. We have phone, cable TV with full sports and movie package and second receiver, and 10MB broadband. The bill is about £130 per month. All the little bits really add up.

Thanks ladies. Seems really odd that one person can pay £51 a month and then someone else £130....I realised you probably have different add-ons etc but that is a huge difference. They obviously have a fair amount of discretion on what they charge.

On looking at the phone tariffs, it seems pretty expensive....will have to start using those free mobile minutes!

I have phone and BB and its fine.No tv though don't watch enough to warrant that and as custy says most things on computer and freeview

We have been on broadband only with VM for a few years now.

We joined during an offer, which meant we should have been paying only £10pm, but they failed to charge us for several months (Direct debit), then when we'd rung them twice about it and they finally noticed (a month after our second call), they tried to charge us full whack. Since then we've been on the £10pm which is good because when and if it goes up we will have to get cut off.

The internet connection has been fine for the last 8 months or so (touches wood) and we have also been offered a free upgrade from 2mb to 10mb speed.

That's it.

I have been with them for years now and have never had any problems with the tv, phone or internet, but what does piss me off is that they never have any offers going for existing customers, only new ones.

I pay roughly £45 a month for tv, net and phone but a new customer can get all that for half what I pay.

My dad is on the verge of having all of his stuff with them ripped out as he has been a customer since they started but for the last few months they cannot get on the net at all. Virgin keep saying it is a general problem in their area but don't do anything about it.

I would prefer to have Sky tv but haven't got round to sorting it out yet.

We've used them for years. No problems, broadband is reliable, tv fine and we never use the phone but it seems as good as any other. I really like their catch up service as I can watch things when I want without even having to record them. Only problem we've ever had is that we started with NTL, then they were taken over by Virgin and our NTLworld email addresses stopped working. We told them several times to be told they should be working fine now but about three years later they still aren't and it won't recognise us as users. Don't care though as I always use gmail anyway.

norty, we are with them for broadband at the minute, but not phone and TV.

When we switched to sky we tried to get them to give us a better deal, but they wouldn't budge on it. she kept telling me, oh you can have x package containing eg 50 programmes for £35 a month, and wouldn't listen when I said but we only want the 30 programmes offered by Sky for £18 a month.

Re the broadband, I had problems with mine aaaaages ago, when Dd was tiny and kept losing connection; always just after school chucking out time or early evenings! After repeated calls where they told me there was nothing wrong with my signal, we insisted on an engineer coming out who discovered not only a fault on our line caused by their engineer not splicing the cable properly when we had a point installed upstairs, there was a problem with the box as well.

I would keep trying them with regard to a fault. tbh we preferred the virgin TV service to the sky one, although the sky plus is good (virgin wanted to charge us £150 for a Vplus box!)

I would also be wary of Sky wooing you with a much cheaper deal like we were because they hiked the price up after only three months. I should really chase it up with them and see if we can get out of it and go back to virgin....and hopefully get a vplus box for free!!

sorry, that probably wasn't much help!