Jaw vs. Virgin Media

Yeah, that was the thing, though- 'up to' is clearly BS when the line is literally only capable of up to 4% of what they say it is. They couldn't argue with that.

There must be some oftel (or similar?) watchdog type thing with regulations about what can be claimed.

the 'up to' allows them to pass the OFCOM (i think?) regulations so they are untouchable, New Scientist recently has been highlighting the massive number of examples of where this particular phrase is used to advertise and not deliver.

Hmm, interesting. I shall have a look for that article.

In my case, they caved and gave me some nice treatment, but I suspect that was more about wanting to retain a customer and less about wanting to comply with regulations or ethics.

Good advice about going to the MD/CEO's office, I had similar problem with C&W many years ago and wound up getting 6 months free service for all the hassle... Drove me mental in the process tho'... Spoke to Oftel as well who were kind of but not very helpful...

Virgin brought me almost to tears trying to get things connected with them
they fucked up everything possible and 2 months after moving into this property
we still have no internet. I had to give up on them in the end even though I screwed them down
to a crazy deal with all their fuck ups I had to simply give up and and go with BE who's customer support and communication has been amazing.
I've had two other friends who have gone with virgin recently one had to put up with alot of bullshit, the other had everything set up within 2 days of calling and had no issue.

"Retain the customer" is the key phrase. They have a whole 'retentions' department devoted to that. I have had good service off Virgin but my friend in a flat upstairs had one delay after another getting his broadband installed. Threatening in the end to cancel the contract before it had even begun made them act quickly, throw in free installation and refund the cost of phone calls.

I don't understand such behaviour, they're operating in a cut-throat industry and still they seem to get away with it. I've googled Virgin Media complaints for a bit and now have the CEO's email address think I'll give that one a go next.

OK, went with what people said on another forum and send an email to Mr Berkett from Virgin Media, lets see if they reply. If I don't get a reply before 6 today I will call the billing department as BE seems a very reasonable alternative, even if it means getting into bed with BT again.

I have now received a personal email from Neil Berkett that one of his team will contact me shortly. Let's see what happens next.

Any ideas to what I should demand?

Just emailed Mr Berkett:

Hi Neil,

I was advised by a friend to send you a brief overview of how things have been in the first week of being a Virgin customer.

Our telephone line, cable-TV and cable broadband were installed last Friday (the 3rd of December).

When the engineer left the only operational service was the TV. After spending an hour (one solid hour) on the phone to your tech support we got the Internet connection working, but sadly this broke the TV.

After another hour on the phone (2 hours so far, first night of Virgin, all to an 0845) the tech support said "there is nothing further to be done, please wait 24 hours".

She was almost right- it took 48 hours, but the TV then started working, and to be fair now works very well. However, it seems that we are only allowed one of the three services that we are paying for to work- the telephone connection has never worked, and the Virgin automated systems do not recognise the number that the engineer said was ours.

Also, and this did raise an ironic smile, I just clicked on the "Virgin Broadband" speedtester- part of Virgins campaign to shame other ISP's into providing the advertised speed.

I got 0.68 Megabit/sec download, and 0.53 upload- not quite the 10 Meg I am being billed for.

So, as I sit here and type this I have working TV- great. No phone- not so great. And Internet that is barely faster than 56K dial-up.

It would be fair to say that I am disappointed.

I just phoned the customer contact number, which kept me on the line (0845, which Virgin is making money from every minute) for 7 minutes going through automated menu's before telling me that the contact centre had been shut due to the weather.

I would have appreciated not having to pay you £2.50 to find out that you were not going to help me.

My question is are you going to do anything about this?

Neil
shoulda read the whole thread really before jumping in with my 'original' advice... oh well, at least it's a proven method!

ermmmm

saynoto0870.com

just saying, will stop you having to call 0845 numbers

I am prepared to be proved wrong here but I would happily bet £20 that the 0845 number is pointing at a network based ACD/IVR, so it does not have an underlying geographic number, therefore say no to 0870 would be useless in this situation.

Leave. Just ring up billling and tell them you want to take advantage of the money back guarantee.

Strangely you can always get straight through to billing and they are UK based.

Seriously it's not worth it. Paying £130 to BT to get a line fitted was painful but I don't regret it one bit.

Only reason I went with virgin is because we have no roof mounted antenna

My neighbour upstairs has been having problems with his broadband since Oct and was told VM wouldn't be able to resolve til December sometime, might ve a south London network thing with them.

He's been using my BT Broadband connection in the meantime which alternates between days and days of rocksolidness then hours of completely flaky dropped connections.

Must say my VM broadband has been great since we moved into this place... No complaints so far...
#touchwood

I haven't had any issues with them since November last year.
Have you had a reply from VM yet Dammit?

We're getting VM 20 Mb broadband installed today (hopefully the guy should be there doing it right now in fact). We're not having tv or anything else, so hopefully we'll avoid most of the problems people seem to have. My brother has had VM for tv/internet/phone for the last 5 years without a single issue, so there's some hope atleast. Our internet couldn't be much worse than it already is anyway, our poxy 1MB connection (between six, what were my housemates thinking when they signed up for that!) has only worked intermittenly at best for the past month, after a year of endless problems with the BT line.

how much is it costing konijn?

£25.74/month for 20 Mb fibre optic broadband and a phone line with unlimited evening & weekend calls. Free installation, hub and router. Since there's six of us sharing, £4.29 each/month.

^ Fuck! I'm paying £21+ pcm for 10Mb and no fucking phone or poxy TV... Hmmm...

Same here, the catch is that you sign up for a new 12 month contract.
As I've got commitment issues (read, can't wait to get the fuck out of here) I've never bothered with it.

nice one, i am tempted to go with that, but the horror stories in this thread are putting me off i must say....

Just had a text from my housemate, it was all installed no problems, and internet and phone are up and running now, woop :)

An email to* [I]Neil Berkett CEO of VM did wonders for me when I had "issues".
*[/I]http://www.connectotel.com/marcus/ceoemail.html
He is in there somewhere ^
GL

^ Fuck! I'm paying £21+ pcm for 10Mb and no fucking phone or poxy TV... Hmmm...

That is a bum deal these days. Cable is the way to go...

GL

Ha!

That is a bum deal these days. Cable is the way to go...

That is, Virgin optic cable wotsit broadband, unlimited downloads, blah blah... Oh, I dunno...