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Up until recently I was a Virgin Media broadband customer and have since left them and signed up with Plusnet. As an avid gamer (please note, I do not download music or videos) I rely on having reasonably good Internet connectivity and to be honest, I really have not been at all impressed with the service I received from Virgin Media.
I have noticed my Internet service being extremely slow during certain hours...
The final straw for me was when my downward speed was reduced to less than 300kb/sec one Sunday evening. In the past I have had a reliable 2MB/s, even though I live in rural Wales and am some distance from the exchange. Over several months I have noticed my Internet service being extremely slow during certain hours of the day. Virgin have been less than helpful with this and more often than not my emails were ignored.
Being cut off from a recreational activity that I enjoy and look forward to on a Sunday was enough to persuade me to change Internet provider after quite a few years of being with Virgin and NTL before them. To make matters worse I was then contacted to try and persuade me to come back!! Here's the content of the email I was compelled to send back to Virgin...
"Come back to Virgin Media, you're joking aren't you? Your service was so bad I would never consider coming back to Virgin and I would advise you to start listening to your customers and what they expect from a broadband service. Your website is confusing your and your customer service help team are inept at resolving problems. You have never responded to any e-mails I sent you regarding the problems with my service. Throttling bandwidth, traffic shaping or whatever other label you care to hang on it have made Internet use with Virgin totally unacceptable. With a slow service and typical speeds of less that 300kb/sec how is one expected to even surf the web never mind play a game on-line?
I hope for your sake you put your house in order and start giving people what they pay for... a good Internet service, before you loose any more of your customers and come last in the comparison sites Internet service providers. When I was with NTL I always had good service and the help team always responded to any difficulties I had. When Virgin Media took over NTL and the service went straight downhill in my opinion and I hope I never have the misfortune to deal with a company like yours ever again.
Please feel free to pass this e-mail to Richard Branson if you wish... I'm sure he would like to know how THIS customer felt about the service (or lack thereof) from Virgin Media."
Disgruntled George
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Faster broadband - now slower
Offers to existing customers - cannot find your profile and try to charge you double
Contact customer relations and they say they’ll get back - they don’t get back because they cannot justify the reasons for trying to rip you off. Some queries regarding similar incidents a few years ago haven’t been answered.
Virgin Media tries to brush everything under the carpet because, like Branson, they are carpetbaggers and will take what they can without delivering the service you paid for.
It's so disgusting that it is easy to upsize the service [take on more mopre options] via their website when you want to do so, but impossible to downsize the options you have via the web. I am thinking seriously of moving on to to another provider.
Told them I get better service with sky and then hung up. Will be cancelling this connection asap - Will be reporting them to ofcom ect ect. Unacceptable behaviour and false trading.
This is ridiculous, no matter how many times i ring them to fix this, they fiddle with settings that fix it temporarily. After a week or two it's back to it's slow self.
As i have no control of the Broadband in my household, i can't exactly change SP. But if i could, i'd have changed this over a year ago.
I foresee a time when the internet will become unusable most of the time, not just when the kids arrive home from school and start downloading.
It’s all about bandwidth, streaming video and catch-up TV uses a lot,
and the number of users on your local loop.
If only you want to eat the apple pie you can eat as much as you like as fast as you like, but if all your neigbours want a piece, tough!
It`s 5.14am in the morning i am currently downloading at 847kb/s.
Ping is disgusting when playing games , it creates constant lag.
£80+ a month for a piece of crap.
I wish BT would offer a real alternative because i`m very angry at Virgin.
Oliver