My Experiences With Virgin Media’s Appallingly Dreadful Service

3 months on, and Virgin Media have taken no action. The fault still remains, emails ignored.

It’s time to RAAAAAGE again. This time about UK internet (loss of) service provider, Virgin.

I’ve been an optic-fibre broadband customer at home since the cables were laid in 1999. First it was Cable & Wireless, which later became NTL. I had a great connection, with the lowest pings you could imagine. I always pay my bills, and rarely breach the bandwidth limits.

Then one sad day, Richard Branson decided to take over my internet. For the last few years I’ve had the same reoccurring problem. My connection would become unusable at peak times. It’s been becoming a joke recently, so I emailed them for an engineer. I had engineers out, and it got better. Now the problem is back again. So I emailed them again.

…and I emailed them again.

…and again.

…and again

A week or so passes and still no reply whatsoever. I decide to call support.

When I called support (which cost £8.60 to get  through!!!!) I got to speak to a lad on ext.6903.

His suggestion was to record a few speed tests and email the results to him.

• “Great!” I thought and asked for the address to send them to.

• “You’ll have to ring up again.” he said.

• “What? Just to get an email address from you. Can’t you just give me that now?” I asked perplexed. “That will take me another hour, just for a contact address…That’s nearly £10 again!“

• “Yeah, I’m sorry. Just ask for **** on extention 6903″. The Virgin guy answers.

I have no intention of waiting on hold for another hour just to submit information that Virgin Media should be gathering themselves.

I DO NOT work for Virgin Media, I employ their services at a monthly fee. Yet I find myself putting days of work in here, while Virgin do what exactly? A fix seems unlikely at this point, as does the payment of my next bills.

If you are a thinking of becoming a Virgin customer, DON’T DO IT. Your broadband speed could be the speed of dial-up – like ours is. What’s more the support folks are too busy to answer your concerns.

Let us take a look what my 10mb gets. Remember this is the higher 10mb package -not the starter one. £30 per month, with support costing almost £10 per call.

I even decided to sign up on the Virgin Media support site.

…and still there’s no reply from them. Almost two weeks later. They say they “aim to respond within 3 days” too.

So if you feel like being ignored, paying £20 to submit a fault, getting dial-up speeds for £30 a month, waiting for nearly an hour on the phone, waiting weeks for a mail response  – call Virgin Media today!

If you’re upset with your Virgin Media service, feel free to join the long list of people with the same issue. You can find my original whine over on the Virgin Media Support Forums. It’s amazing to see the amount of customers they are neglecting over there.