Virgin Media Broadband Services!

[captain_walker]

Get a load of this.

1. I stupidly went back to NTL for Broadband about 2 years ago because BT was jerking me around.
2. NTL became VirginMedia - which from today onwards is hereby declared Edited!
3. They took my money £37/month for a 4MB broadband connection. Then their prices went down eventually to £25/month.
4. I normally got about 3MB download speed on the busiest periods and on a late Sunday night I might even get 5MB download! So I was very happy.
5. I never had reason to worry or complain until about 3 weeks ago when my broadband speed went down to 1MB.
6. I made several phone calls to Edited.
7. Quite often I ended up speaking with someone with an Indian or Pakistani accent. My words just didn't seem to hit home with these people.
8. I was normally asked to speak to broadband techical support - and spend my money at 25p/min. And if Edited decided it was their fault, I'd get a refund on the phone charges. But if not I'd be stuffed.
9. So I said stuff it. I'd continue to call up Edited and report the problem every few days.
10. Well more of the same robotic responses from people in Indian accents.
11. Emailed Edited twice - no reponses to my emails.
12. Then on Friday 28th March 2008, I get through to someone speaking with a Glaswegian accent. So I thought "Goody now I'd be heard". So I explain the problem that, "My broadband connection is working but having followed all the instructions for troubleshooting I'm getting a broadband speed of 256kb/s instead of anything nearer 4MB." So Ms Glaswegian accent goes "So is your broadband not working?" So I flip my lid, "Am I speaking some kind of differerent language?" Ms Edited woman responds, "Well you don't have to respond it that way". So I go "Well I do because I just told you that I'm getting a broadband speed of 256kb/s which means the broadband is working. So how can you ask me if my broadband is not working when I'm getting a broadband connection at 256kb/s? It seems a rather ridiculous and irrelevant question - isn't it?"
13. Well I realise this dimwit was going to waste my time. Look, I really love Glaswegian folk. Very nice people. My response was not about her Glaswegianness but in about how close she approximated to two planks. Okay?!
14. So I said to dimwit at Edited "I've called you with one purpose in mind, which was to report a problem. I'm aware you'd have me call a premium rate line at 25p/min - a choice I wish not to make - because I find it fundamentally unfair. I have completed the purpose of this call and I will terminate this conversation in under 10 seconds. Thank you for your time." Call terminated in 5 seconds.
15. So guess what at 22:45 2008-03-30 (Sunday) my BB speed is down to 127kb/s on what's meant to be a 4MB broadband connection.
16. Now rewind to two weeks ago. High official from Edited called me on 19th March (just before Bank Holiday Friday). You won't believe this. High official says that according to there terms and conditons (which she reads out) they are not obliged to provide any particular BB speed (or words to that effect). I say well I'm not into a debate on contractual legalities. I'm only concerned that it is unreasonable to pay for 4MB and only get 1MB. So Edited high official then begins to debate that it is not a contract!! FFS - now she's arguing that Terms and Conditions are not part of the contractual agreement and that they are not legal. HOLY CRAP!!
17. My sentences are clipped about 5 times and I sternly point out the poor customer service that represents - referenced against well established customer service principles. So she STFU for a few seconds.
18. Eventually she offers £10 and advises I call the BB technical support.
19. On 20th I call back to speak with high official. No repsonse that day.
20. On Bank Holiday Friday, the phone comes to life. High Official claims she left a message on my phone and that I did not answer on the Thursday. Well I'm such a bad boy innit? I don't answer my phone and I magically erase voice mail before I've got it. :o
21. So - I let high official know that I refuse to play ball. I advise her to take back her £10 and that I'd soldier on with the 1MB connection until May 25th when I will give notice.
22. Reason for the above: Edited Billing said that they'd pursue me for £153 if I broke the contract. So lets see. Milk my ass of £25/mth and give me 0.25 of the value of that money. Then pursue me for arrears on Edited service.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Edited is NTL dressed up in the Emperor's new clothes. Don't be fooled. The Virgin brand is what has them going - but it means very little. Stay clear. Do not be blinded by promises of 10MB bb etc. It's pure pain when it goes wrong.

I'm thinkng of asking for a refund of my money - the difference between cost of 4MB bb and 1MB bb. Why should from March 2008. Seems reasonable to me.

[For doubters, I have done all the tests, checked the router, done the firewalls, checked Wireless cards, removed concrete walls, reformatted the hard drive, checked the virus shield, refresehed the connection a dozen times, checked the bb speed with four different computers.]

[dx100uk]

your very best bet is to forget all of that.

get onto the virginmedia newsgroups on outlook express.
goto the virginmedia.broadband, support one.
and post there that you have only had 1mb since X date & that you wish a refund & the problem sorted.

the 'support' groups are manned during working hours by tech support & they will deal your problem..

dx

[captain_walker]

Thanks for the tip. You should be working for Edited. You've done a better job than their staff. Well, they probably couldn't pay you enough.

I've posted to the New Groups. Will see what happens.

[dx100uk]

who says i don't....
i hope you mean group and did not crosspost.

i'll look later

it's better sometimes not to be so ......... wound up shall we call it.

not nice to others nor to read

dx

[ReasonableRon]

I've had a few run-ins with Virgin but on the whole the products I have (4mb broadband, tv., phone) are pretty good value.

When I had a major run in with them last year over a faulty modem (which some genius in calcutta was convinced was a faulty cat5 cable) I gave them notice to cancel all 3 services. I then spoke to BT about what they could do for me and quickly realised I was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire - they were awful, and to a potential new customer!!!

I ended up bypassing the normal Virgin helplines and speaking to someone with an ounce of sense in their customer services dept, who listened to my problems, arranged for an engineer to call and deal with them and gave me a £10pm discount for the next 6 months.

Needless to say I'm still with them, and to their credit don't consider them to be half bad if you know which buttons to press when you ring them up.

[captain_walker]

Originally Posted by dx100uk

who says i don't....
i hope you mean group and did not crosspost.

i'll look later
......
dx

Not sure what you mean by 'crosspost' - where? to whom?

Originally Posted by dx100uk

....it's better sometimes not to be so ......... wound up shall we call it.

not nice to others nor to read.

Wound up is right! When Edited give me Edited to eatI do get wound up. I don't like the taste of it - to say the least.

Remember that I've been doing a massive pruning and censoring of all the detail just to give a synopsis of what would be 10,000 words (no joke). You think it's easy to filter crap like that? No it ain't. I'm still part of the human race - I'm sad to know. Others, if they have a problem with it, need to be more empathic and understanding of the stress people are put through by the likes of Edited.

[captain_walker]

Originally Posted by ReasonableRon

.....
When I had a major run in with them last year over a faulty modem (which some genius in calcutta was convinced was a faulty cat5 cable) I gave them notice to cancel all 3 services. I then spoke to BT about what they could do for me and quickly realised I was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire - they were awful, and to a potential new customer!!!

I ended up bypassing the normal Virgin helplines and speaking to someone with an ounce of sense in their customer services dept, who listened to my problems, arranged for an engineer to call and deal with them and gave me a £10pm discount for the next 6 months.

.....

I agree BT is not the best alternative. However, Edited does a terrible 'legal' trick that I've discovered. They gave me this £10 discount, which they then used as a lock-in on all my four services. I'm not falling for that again.

I've decided to separate my services, so I can ditch whichever I want. So on my BT line I'll be putting Be BB at £18/mth for unlimited 24MB (almost guaranteed at >5MB) and I can ditch them for a mere £40 pound anytime I want. I'll lose a phoneline with Edited but switch to Skype for all outgoing calls via BB.

Customer Services? Don't let me start. Complaints Dept? Been there. I almost made that call to Mr Scot. Some plonker decided to argue with me that Terms and Conditions were not part of a legally binding contract, whilst quoting them to me. I think expletives are banned out here, so I'll allow you to think up some that crossed my mind (did not go down the phoneline) and were shouted after the phone went down. Oh yeah, Edited records your calls - but...but if you ever...ever..say you're recording your call, they put the phone down on you. Ooooh dey got somik to hide, mun.

I've had it with NTL which is now dressed up as Edited . Once they fix this Edited -or even if they don't I'm giving notice - unless they give like 3 months free BB to compensate for the Edited(not I won't be asking). I've been heavily researching alternative strategies for telephone and VOIP communications, which I'll share later. Cable TV - I can live without, because I've already got Lovefilm's best package.

[dx100uk]

Originally Posted by captain_walker

Not sure what you mean by 'crosspost' - where? to whom?

you said 'groups'



Wound up is right! When Edited give me crap to eat I do get wound up. I don't like the taste of it - to say the least.

Remember that I've been doing a massive pruning and censoring of all the detail just to give a synopsis of what would be 10,000 words (no joke). You think it's easy to filter craplike that? No it ain't. I'm still part of the human race - I'm sad to know. Others, if they have a problem with it, need to be more empathic and understanding of the stress people are put through by the likes of Edited.

well you've obviously been a customer for a while, then you go mental, when somethings goes wrong.

i think you need to take a chill pill if thats the way you run your life, going ballistic about a short term one-off error on an otherwise working service as ive not found any other posts from you neither here nor on WM groups,

whilst im on that, i notice your problem appears to of solved itself as there has been no posts on your VM thread since 01:40am today.? where it appears it was your router that was at fault not VM?

so answer honestly ... was it virginmedia or was it your own router that was causing the problem?


anyhow i'm going to recommend this thread be removed as i think it is unfair to VM.


good day

dx

[tomterm8]

I won't close the thread, as I don't think it breaks any site rules, however I agree that it is unfair. I am not aware of any broadband provider that guarantees the speed of the connection, and it seems it was a hardware problem at your end.

Further, as a debt expert on these forums, I would suggest you keep paying according to contract, as failure to do so will result in a default notice being issued that could cost you thousands of pounds over the next 6 years due to higher interest payments.

[tomterm8]

I have edited an expletive used to describe virgin media, since there were complaints.

[captain_walker]

Many thanks tomterm8.

It's a mystery what dx100uk has referred to. S/he has alluded to the possibility of being a VM employee.

VM has not found anything of the kind referred to by VM. The information and the conclusions formed are therefore erroneous and - wilfully, accidentally or unwittingly misleading. But the way they were offered was in a rather 'matter of fact' way.

So to be 100% clear:

i notice your problem appears to of solved itself as there has been no posts on your VM thread since 01:40am today.? where it appears it was your router that was at fault not VM?

is a totally false statement. Am I surprised, mindful of the possibility created in the minds of others by dx100uk, that s/he may be an employee of VM? No - I'm not. Will dx100uk now categorically deny being a VM employee? I think s/he will.

On the brighter side - only for an attempt at temporarily improving my bb service - VM has responded to 'help'. But guess what? I've got to jump through 4 hoops each containing some 1 to 3 smaller hoops.

Well yes, someone will probably say that its the same for everybody. That's not the issue. Part of good customer services is about responding in a way that brings people to a solution quickly and efficienty and promotes your business even further.

Instead of putting customers to jump through hoops - it would be a simpler, cost effective, more efficient and customer friendly way - to simply post a customer some device that tests the line, with a set of scripted tests, from their end. The customer posts back the device with the results. Circuit time 3 days instead of say 28. If the device does not exist at this time and isn't patented at this time, I hearby lay claim to the idea as my intellectual property (timestamp as on your forum) [print-offs taken just in case].

This was never an issue about broadband speed, router or any such thing. It was essentially about customer service. I never expected any bb services to guarantee the speed they quoted. But to tell a customer to accept one-eight of the speed their paying for because of some ditsy Term or Condition, is wholly and fundamentally unfair.

What happens in Rip-off Britain is that big private organisations enjoy humping you so long as you give them your hard earned money. The day you have a problem - hey, they don't really want to deal with you in an efficient way. Instead they send you to jump through hoops. No - this is entirely wrong business philosophy. I've seen in too many times in the Britain. Something is fundamentally wrong culturally with business in Britain.

[dx100uk]

going by information in this thread upon your equipment & from the thread in vm.bb.spt newsgroup, as well as the scripts VM telephone support staff will follow on screen when trying to diagnose slow connection issues, you would have been asked numerous times to remove your personnal wireless router and connect your VM Cable Modem direct to a PC and test your speeds then.
it appears [certainly from the VM newgroup thread, that this requested test has not been carried out? [there certainly seems to be no record of the results showing from you.]

currently 4Mb VM customers are being upgraded to 10Mb FOC, to enable this to happen, certain changes were made to the cable system, this can cause issues with a variety of wireless routers, making through put slow, it can also affect certain firewall software.
it would be very nice to accertain that the fault is with VM equipment, or with your own setup.

thus either way we can decide if your rant about VM customer service, its alleged poor quality & its permium rate charges are justified.

as far as i can remember, this was the reason the newsgroups were setup. The free VM support [as it was] telephone service were getting snowed under with complaints, when 90% of the time, it was user error or the users equipment they had additionally connected to their pc was at error and nothing to do with VM.

bit like buying a childs car seat, finding out it does not fit and complaining to the car manufacturer that they made their car wrong.

i'll leave it there.


dx

[captain_walker]

So was

i notice your problem appears to of solved itself as there has been no posts on your VM thread since 01:40am today.? where it appears it was your router that was at fault not VM?

a true or false statement? I think a 'yes' or 'no' would suffice. Lots of effort to give the single word - huh?

as far as i can remember, this was the reason the newsgroups were setup. The free VM support [as it was] telephone service were getting snowed under with complaints, when 90% of the time, it was user error or the users equipment they had additionally connected to their pc was at error and nothing to do with VM.

The above is itself clear evidence of a company that is clueless as to how to deal with these obvious and predictable problems. Amazingly - as a supposed VM employee - you have not demonstrated knowledge which you might have, if you knew, that VM is actually reverting to a local rate support line from 1st June 2008. So what's gonna happen then? A deluge of calls I suppose.

VM could have avoided cost and customer dissatisfaction and promoted loyalty by offering to replace users equipment for free or at a competitive rate. Standardising equipment could - and I'm not suggesting it is the only way - to avoid some of the problems. Surely VM with its big muscles has sufficient purchasing power to bring wired and wireless routers etc down in cost to a mere tenner.

VM could have had loads of online video or DVD video to help customers, instead of some ditsy Newsgroup designed mainly for the most technogically accomplished who like reading gobbledegook and jumping through hoops.

Oh I notice no one has commented on why some plonker in a customer services department doesn't not know that Terms and Conditions form part of a contractual agreement. No you don't have to be a lawyer to knwo about any of this - not at all. BTW the law is for the common man - and certainly complaints and customer services department personnel should be so educated. If it was my company sackings would be in order for the manager of the mentioned staff member. Ooooh but I need remined myself that in Britain welfare on the job is the modus operandi - and those who call for sackings are being insensitive and draconian. Sod it.

Newsgroup? The first I heard of it was in this forum. Doesn't it suprise any one out there that my having spent so much time talking to VM staff that not a single one of them suggested the Newsgroup? I had to come here to learn about it. That is what Rip-off Britain calls great customer services knowledge innit? Sackings!! I'll say it again - if it was my Company the old guard would be hunted down and sacked -else I'd pay the lot to leave.

VM is in my opinion is - part of the great imperialist British Rip-off. Any Wal-Mart people out there? Please rescue us customers - start doing Broadband and doing it good. Show the British how to do business!! Wal-Mart or some other company should jump in and guarantee bb line speeds. It isn't nuclear physics. All you need is a tiny piece of software monitoring network speeds intermittently on a sample of users' computers (with their consent) and feeding back approximate figures to a central server. If download speeds fall below a certain level consistently, you know what the heck is going on before the upset customer complains.

We have the technology and the brains we don't have the will and the mindset for business in this Rip-off land. And we're darn good at creating rubbish excuses for why things cannot happen and for maintaining the status quo. Wal-Mart now!! Show um!

[tomterm8]

Since I have read the virgin Terms and Conditions, I would point out that those terms and conditions explicitly state that the speed listed is the maximum speed possible if all equipment is working to optimum efficiency. further, there is no contractual requirement for them to support your hardware. If they do so, it is as a goodwill gesture.