Virgin Media Rant time

[Growler]

Anyone else having problems with their service at the moment. Cable TV is working fine, but my broadband connection has now been down for close on 2days

Having to use the works GSM widget to get online so not gonna be happening to often for the next few days.

Having spoken to the "helpline" it would appear they are experiencing a large number of logged calls for the same issue in the birmingham area and their engineers are working on it. Appears the fault should be rectified by next Monday, but may be intermittent in the mean time still won;t say what the fault is though.

Anyone know of any good deals going with other suppliers as i feel this amount of downtime is unacceptable in this age of technology.

Just hope the airport aren't relying on them

[scudmonkey]

Been with BT Broadband for the last 2 1/2 years and not had any issues. But I guess its luck of the draw!

[Albannach]

I've been with Virgin since it was Blueyonder. Only had one outage of more than one day, that was when someone snapped the main Fibre Optic cable at Cumbernauld.

Not a bad record for what must be 10 years of use?

[Maverick]

Been with BT Broadband for the last 2 1/2 years and not had any issues. But I guess its luck of the draw!

Yep it does appear to be luck rather that good service. I'm not with BT due to their customer support (or lack of it )when problems arise.

It appears by reading other peoples experiance, that they are all good when everything is going fine, but when there's problems they haven't put the support in place to deal with it effectively.

[Nick V]

My Virgin b/band is pants at the moment. The service went down just after Xmas and since it is back on, I cannot access most sites and the ones I can takes years to load!!!

I spoke to their tech support people (foreign call centre ) and for some reason they could not understand that it was working perfectly normal before the off and and now it doesn't! However, what has pi**ed me off the most, is the fact that the bloke I spoke too decided he could not deal with me once he realised I had a wireless router that was not supplied by Virgin! I even explained how that would not be causing the problem, but even when I when straight into the Virgin box with a cable, he insisted that cos I had a non Virgin wireless router, he could not help me!! What a tw*t!!

Still, he did tell me he was pleased to have helped me - what great customer service

Cheers, Nick

[gwh200]

we are with sky.............have been for about 2 years now,never any problems.......so far

[da SLUG man]

we had no end of problems with NTL (before they were virgin)...
now with BT and never a problem... sometimes get disconnected, but it'll connect again straight away (very rarely does it)


i think it all depends what part of the country you're in, as we're only 1 mile from the local exchange, it seems pretty quick (for home use) but out in the sticks, on old cables, my mate has quite a bit of trouble with BT and Virgin won't run a cable to him!...

[Tallyman]

We moved from VM to Sky last year, partly because VM lost Sky 1 but also because we were paying a fortune for a crap 2Mb Broadband service with them. Now more than happy with Sky, although it was a nightmare for a while because BT ######## up the transfer of our phone line from VM. Now we're paying £5 per month for an 8Mb service with Sky, although only getting around 6Mb because that's all the line can handle, but it's far better than VM.

Take the plunge and give VM the boot (hell, what am I saying, our firm does £M's of business with them each year and we need all the work we can get at the moment). I doubt you'll regret it.

[Scorpion]

I've been with Virgin Media / Blueyonder for around 5 years now, and in that time I've only had connection problems once. The service desk guy tried to give me the runaround with the old switch it on and off cr@p! I told him I'd been around computers and internet systems for years and that I thought the problem was at their end. He said they didn't have any problems and took me through a few settings, that I already knew about, and said it would be okay now.

Of course it wasn't, but 2 days later it came back to life all by itself without me touching anything! I just wish that if the problem was at their end they would admit it, so you didn't try and correct a problem on your end that wasn't there!

Anyhoo, had the same story with my brothers Talk Talk internet connection and my mates Tiscali. As was said earlier sometimes it's just the luck of the draw.

To conclude, 5 years with VM/Blueyonder and one breakdown seems like a good run for my money, so I'm sticking with them!

[Tallyman]

One thing to remember with VM, or probably any ISP for that matter, is if you realise you are paying over the going rate for the service then ring them and tell them you are giving notice to change supplier. You can bet they'll be on the phone within 48 hours to offer you a better deal to stay with them. I had that three times when I quit. I could have got a deal closer to what I now have with Sky/Bt but I really didn't want to stick with them any longer.

[J_D]

I've been with Virgin Media / Blueyonder for around 5 years now, and in that time I've only had connection problems once. The service desk guy tried to give me the runaround with the old switch it on and off cr@p! I told him I'd been around computers and internet systems for years and that I thought the problem was at their end. He said they didn't have any problems and took me through a few settings, that I already knew about, and said it would be okay now.

Of course it wasn't, but 2 days later it came back to life all by itself without me touching anything! I just wish that if the problem was at their end they would admit it, so you didn't try and correct a problem on your end that wasn't there!

My gran's with VM. When hers stopped working she was told that the firewall installed on her computer had given the tv a virus! Amazingly a couple of days later it all worked fine. Just a pity I wasn't there when she called, I'd like to have heard the guy explain that one to me...

[Growler]

Wel the good news is that all is back up and running and 3 days before their estimated repair time too.

Had another discussion with the UK helpdesk today. Much impressed with the young lad on the phone as he actually went and found out what fault was so he could let me know. Also offered to sort out some compo for the downtime

Think i might hang in with them for the time being