If you’re a residential customer and want fibre optic broadband internet in the UK, you only have one choice: Virgin Media. It owns every last inch of the cables. We’re all very familiar with their glossy adverts, promising high speed connections, unlimited downloads and excellent prices. Trouble is, it is a pack of lies.
The small print notes that the promised speed is more like the speed limit for road traffic: the company says it will deliver the net to you “up to” it. Despite having been a cable customer for more than ten years, I don’t think I have ever been given the promised speed. I put up with it because cable can still deliver speeds far in excess of the ADSL technology used by Sky and other ISPs.
Recently I received notification from Virgin Media that it was going to ramp up the speed it served my internet by. Wisely, I didn’t hold my breath. The company promises the earth but serves up shit instead. Certainly my speed has not improved. Instead, the service has collapsed. Every day for the last several days, the service has dropped out more often than Timothy Leary. In the earlier days of the net, when we used dial up connections and did not experience outages at all, this would not have mattered because the web pages we looked at were pretty static. Sure, there was the odd form to fill in but that was it. These days almost every web page I use requires a continuous connection and that’s before I get to uploading anything to my various domains.
Virgin Media is very good at making itself look like it cares. Today I’ve been complaining to the world via twitter and Virgin Media has been sending banal platitudes in reply. The casual reader might think that this was a company which took customer service seriously.
In fact, if you do phone its customer service number, you’ll find it’s an 08 number, which means you have to pay for it from your mobile. If the company gave a shit it would provide at least a landline number to call. When you call them, an automated and patronisingly chirpy voice gives you an endless telephone menu to wade through, with an incredible number of options focused on you giving the company more money. Today I called that number twice, for ten minutes each time. Of course, once you hit the automated voice, you’re paying for the call. Virgin Media did not answer the phone today. Other people routinely make the same complaint. Why Branson’s crew believe that we would want to choose what sort of music to listen to whilst waiting for someone to not answer the phone is completely beyond me. We ring them because we want to talk to someone about their crappy service, not listen to a robot cheerily allow us to executive some kind of pointless musical preference.
Last month I phoned Virgin Media to ask it to cancel my landline telephone service. This morning it has sent me a bill charging me for it for the next month.
Imagine a bus company carrying on like this: cancelling services between one stop and another every day, vehicles going in and out of service sometimes several times a minute and all the while charging people who didn’t travel on it. It wouldn’t just lose its operator’s licence. The directors would be prosecuted for fraud. I can think of other charges too.
If the electricity, gas or water distributors behaved like this there would be a political crisis. For some reason, despite Virgin Media enjoying a monopoly position and the internet being crucial to so much modern living, this company thinks it can hold us in contempt.
No longer. When my current project is finished, I’ll be taking on Virgin Media by setting up a website to assist people to reclaim the fees they’ve paid for a service they haven’t received. Virgin Media say they will give you credit but I think the law will give us more. I think we can go to court, en masse, to claim cold hard cash., I’ve got the legal skills and I’ve got the technical skills, which is more than you can say for Virgin Media.
My current project still has some weeks to run, perhaps as many as four. This is a warning for you Richard Branson. Whatever love affair the great British public once had with you is now over. It is time to abandon your space toys and get back to basics. Otherwise, the basics are going to ground you. How many customers does Virgin Media have? I think they all have complaints. Think about the financial consequences of even a fraction of them recovering money from you in court. Not to mention the legal costs.
Pingback: Virgin Media’s landline number | Scrapper Duncan
I live in kind-of suburban liverpool and the speeds for normal broadband are pretty awful by today’s standards. Because we lived so far from their nearest station, we got 2mb download speed (in real terms: 250 kb/s) but we paid the same price as everyone else on the same package paid for the 10mb service.
For the last 2 years while I was at uni, i used virgin media 25mb. And 25mb (about 2500 kb/s) is exactly what I got. In the 2nd year I got the 50mb package, and again I got exactly that. Now I’m back at my parents house in liverpool where they finally decided to switch the service and now instead of 2mb, we get the full 25mb that we’re paying for.
About 10 yrs ago we were on Blueyonder cable and it was great because once a year they would increase our speed without extra charge. The only problem was that they got really harsh on throttling. However since I’ve gotten back with cable these last 2 yrs on virgin media, I’ve not once been throttled despite doing a lot of downloading. In fact, if my counter hasn’t reset in the past 6 months, I’ve download 630gb total and uploaded 297.
However what is concerning is that as you say, virgin have a monopoly on the whole thing. So far though, I don’t think they’ve abused their situation.
I’m just an ordinary retired person who got a huge shock with my last Virgin phone bill. My fault I suppose for not realizing exactly what I was getting for what I was paying. Anyway it was enough to make me decide to leave Virgin. The company I chose to go with (Talk Talk) told me, however, that because I was with Virgin, I would not be able to take the number with me which I have had for the last nineteen years. I was told that Virgin would probably tell me I could do so but in reality, Virgin numbers are not compatible with a new system apart from, perhaps, Sky. So I have to decide between staying with Virgin and keeping my number but paying through the nose, or moving to get a much better deal and losing my number. I’m so incensed that Virgin can have such a monopoly that I’m going to leave them. And I liked Richard Branson until now. Or could it be that he does not know or care how Virgin Media really operates?
I’m getting fed up with the fact that I’m stuck with Vermin, sorry, Virgin, as I don’t have a BT line. The service, even in a large city, is so slow that I can’t even stream audio in real time, let alone video. To download a half-hour programme on iPlayer takes all night. It’s much slower than Blueyonder used to be, and yet they claim they’re the fastest. Sooner or leter I’m going to bite the bullet and pay to have a BT line reinstalled.