Virgin Media Discussion Thread

chroniclard · 13 Mar 2020 at 12:42

Its frustrating VM have a monopoly in lots of areas. Its either 500meg VM or like 30 meg BT/others. Hopefully this will improve in the future.

beachBOYken · 13 Mar 2020 at 12:54

Relentless81 said:
Seeing this thread has just reminded me of the yearly anguish of having to contact them and threaten to cancel unless they can match the previous years monthly payment, really hate phoning Virgin Media life is too short to be stuck on the phone waiting to speak to someone

Same here, its a shame you can't negotiate a price and have it fixed for 2-3 years without any of these prices increase they hit customers with almost every year.

xb8browney · 13 Mar 2020 at 15:45

Got hung up on twice but my cancellation is in.

father-ted · 15 Mar 2020 at 09:47

I need to call and put a cancellation in, to try and get a cheaper deal.
Not many other options for me where I live - gigabit networks currently stops about 1 mile from my house.
Hate calling VM, absolute nightmare to deal with over the phone, then get cut off randomly to have to start all over again with somebody else.

MartinPrince · 16 Mar 2020 at 09:31

beachBOYken said:
Same here, its a shame you can't negotiate a price and have it fixed for 2-3 years without any of these prices increase they hit customers with almost every year.

I don't think anybody is ever going to give you a fixed 2-3 year deal for any utility, though you should get at least a year without price increases.

I'm paying £31.50 for M350 only, it was £28 before the price increase. I called to cancel and they offered me £43 month. I left them go through with the normal spiel of "...But you use so much data and nobody is as good as us, yada yada..." then just politely asked them to complete the request I asked for. Even if they do call back I'll probably just decline and rejoin as new customer as it's in the missus name.

As I have Sky and BTSports I will just get the Ultimate Oomph bundle as, due to recent price increases across the board, that is now cheaper than I get all three for separately.

xb8browney · 16 Mar 2020 at 19:35

Got my call already, new price £33 pm M350 I'm happy with that.

spoffle · 16 Mar 2020 at 23:36

MartinPrince said:
I don't think anybody is ever going to give you a fixed 2-3 year deal for any utility, though you should get at least a year without price increases.

I'm paying £31.50 for M350 only, it was £28 before the price increase. I called to cancel and they offered me £43 month. I left them go through with the normal spiel of "...But you use so much data and nobody is as good as us, yada yada..." then just politely asked them to complete the request I asked for. Even if they do call back I'll probably just decline and rejoin as new customer as it's in the missus name.

As I have Sky and BTSports I will just get the Ultimate Oomph bundle as, due to recent price increases across the board, that is now cheaper than I get all three for separately.

When I cancelled last year, I never got a call back. It didn't matter because I was moving to BT FTTP, but I think threats to cancel might be ignored in certain areas or circumstances.

Converge · 17 Mar 2020 at 19:51

Looks like more people being at home is making my internet laggy. The joy of having 1gb but the reliability and resilience of a soggy bit of bog roll with VM.

Avalon · 17 Mar 2020 at 22:08

Converge said:
Looks like more people being at home is making my internet laggy. The joy of having 1gb but the reliability and resilience of a soggy bit of bog roll with VM.

Perhaps consider exactly how peering and routing work in the context of ‘the internet’ before making such a generic ‘blame the isp’ statement. Higher bandwidth utilisation is likely to have happened at Christmas than now, also local capacity issues tend to be relatively isolated/known about. The areas I would expect to be suffering now are possibly those with a large student population as most Uni’s/Colleges seem to have shut down.

Converge · 17 Mar 2020 at 22:45

Avalon said:
Perhaps consider exactly how peering and routing work in the context of ‘the internet’ before making such a generic ‘blame the isp’ statement. Higher bandwidth utilisation is likely to have happened at Christmas than now, also local capacity issues tend to be relatively isolated/known about. The areas I would expect to be suffering now are possibly those with a large student population as most Uni’s/Colleges seem to have shut down.

Fair enough, but to then reply with a generic ‘it could be a number of factors’ hardly puts your post in a better light either.

I suppose I should have said that I’m annoyed that Virgin Media appears not to have the capacity in my area to cope with a higher usage at peak times due to people not being at work/not travelling to & from work/not out, which results in higher contention rate which is down to their services being oversubscribed in my area.
Their model is for sales above all else and not customer service and it never has been anything more.

It was similar at Christmas. Does that make it alright? Not really.

Avalon · 18 Mar 2020 at 11:12

Converge said:
Fair enough, but to then reply with a generic ‘it could be a number of factors’ hardly puts your post in a better light either.

I suppose I should have said that I’m annoyed that Virgin Media appears not to have the capacity in my area to cope with a higher usage at peak times due to people not being at work/not travelling to & from work/not out, which results in higher contention rate which is down to their services being oversubscribed in my area.
Their model is for sales above all else and not customer service and it never has been anything more.

It was similar at Christmas. Does that make it alright? Not really.

In terms of a ‘better light’, what benefit would throwing 10 other obvious potential issues at you have when you had provided no context/testing methodology/results or shown any evidence of the issue you describe (and still haven’t) or shown any understanding of how the network you’re using or the number of other networks you route through impact what you describe as ‘slow’?

VM are in the process of doubling available speeds (yet again), you don’t generally do that without adding node capacity and having the ability to handle the extra traffic on the core network, off network peering/routing/transit is another thing entirely of course. Unfortunately if it is local capacity, it has to meet the trigger criteria, go through planning, approval and finally build, obviously with everything else going on at present in the wider world at present, that’s going on the back burner. Most residential ISP’s don’t generally build the network capacity for everyone to saturate the connection 24/7 (as you point out) for the handful of days a year when peak capacity normally happens, or at least it’s less common in a highly price sensitive market where end users get upset over a £1-2 price increase.

exhashdotdot · 18 Mar 2020 at 18:16

This is a long shot but the virgin forums are absolutely terrible to use.

Is anyone in the Bristol area struggling with their Virgin this week? I'm getting significant numbers of disconnects throughout the day and this is reflected in my Broadband Quality Monitor; just wondering if this is due to extra demand due to COVID-19.

MartinPrince · 19 Mar 2020 at 16:07

spoffle said:
When I cancelled last year, I never got a call back. It didn't matter because I was moving to BT FTTP, but I think threats to cancel might be ignored in certain areas or circumstances.

It could well be though as far back as I can remember I have always had a call back after cancelling. In fact, I had cancelled last year when my contract ended to see whether I could get the price down and I got not 1 but 2 call backs. I'm only still with them now as my monthly credits ran out about 8 months after my contract ended and there was nothing cheaper.

It will be interesting to see if they will call as they might be able to see I have got an installation the day after it is disconnected. I've booked the Ultimate Oomph for £79 (normally £89) with £200 back via TopCashBack.

Captain · 19 Mar 2020 at 17:03

Do I need new equipment to get gigabit even if I have the SH3?

Avalon · 19 Mar 2020 at 17:38

MartinPrince said:
It could well be though as far back as I can remember I have always had a call back after cancelling. In fact, I had cancelled last year when my contract ended to see whether I could get the price down and I got not 1 but 2 call backs. I'm only still with them now as my monthly credits ran out about 8 months after my contract ended and there was nothing cheaper.

It will be interesting to see if they will call as they might be able to see I have got an installation the day after it is disconnected. I've booked the Ultimate Oomph for £79 (normally £89) with £200 back via TopCashBack.

It would be more of a ball ache to purge the new account and argue with sales over someone breaching sales/credit policy and pushing for a disciplinary than just letting the install go ahead, I’d suspect anyone who viewed that account would consider that wasting an hour dealing with that crap was less beneficial than calling another 2-3 customers.

MartinPrince · 19 Mar 2020 at 20:36

Mcnumpty2323 said:
Lol
Didn't notice
They have probably been
On hold for 13 years

It was worth the the thread necro just to read that comment.

tomwalker · 19 Mar 2020 at 22:13

Clov!s said:
Do I need new equipment to get gigabit even if I have the SH3?

Yes - I was sent the Hub 4 and my 1gig service was activated this morning. I just swapped the box myself and you send them a text to activate before swapping. Nice and quick!

xb8browney · 19 Mar 2020 at 22:45

Nice, is that broadband only as that's all I'm interested in.

Captain · 19 Mar 2020 at 23:12

tomwalker said:
Yes - I was sent the Hub 4 and my 1gig service was activated this morning. I just swapped the box myself and you send them a text to activate before swapping. Nice and quick!

Ordered, being delivered Saturday.

Only on the 200M package as I live on my own but for an extra £12 a month, why not.

tomwalker · 20 Mar 2020 at 08:06

xb8browney said:
Nice, is that broadband only as that's all I'm interested in.

yep - we only have broadband via them and upgraded from the 350mb package to the 1gig service.