Virgin Media - great service but they really do test my patience at times. (renewal costs)

SexyGreyFox said:
I'm on Smarty £10 for 60gb and wife just gone on £5 for 4gb.
I've no use for unlimited HOWEVER useful when stuff like this happens.
I am typing this on a wired connection - just.
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I am thinking of ditching Virgin and just keeping this, later on in the evenings I get this speed:

Screenshot-20230227-223746.png


Just done a test now and in the peak times it's more like this:

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Whereas with Virgin I am on 500mbit flat, might as well ditch them to be honest, it's extra money I'm paying when 5G is just as good nowadays and much faster downloads haha.
 
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Huxton said:
I am thinking of ditching Virgin and just keeping this, later on in the evenings I get this speed:

Screenshot-20230227-223746.png


Just done a test now and in the peak times it's more like this:

Untitled.png


Whereas with Virgin I am on 500mbit flat, might as well ditch them to be honest, it's extra money I'm paying when 5G is just as good nowadays and much faster downloads haha.
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I only get about 50mbps in my house and outside.
My Brother In Law gets 850mbps and he has had the Three router at my suggestion and at work I'm hitting 970mbps.
 
Good timing from VM. Just as they have told everyone their bill is about to go up by around 15% and as there is more competition than ever.

I am switching to a new Fibre provider as soon as I can. Called up VM to see what deal they could offer and the woman on the phone could only offer me crap deals and scoffed at the fact I was switching to another provider that was cheaper and far faster because "how do you know they will be reliable". :rolleyes:

This could cost VM a lot of money.
 
fez said:
Good timing from VM. Just as they have told everyone their bill is about to go up by around 15% and as there is more competition than ever.

I am switching to a new Fibre provider as soon as I can. Called up VM to see what deal they could offer and the woman on the phone could only offer me **** deals and scoffed at the fact I was switching to another provider that was cheaper and far faster because "how do you know they will be reliable". :rolleyes:

This could cost VM a lot of money.
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I've had exactly the same treatment however a friend rang up today to cancel VM because she has just had Lila a week ago and they offered her 1gb for £29.
I get mine installed next tuesday and I know in two weeks when I cancel they'll offer the same - they are useless.
 
Agreed with the OP here in that Virgin (formerly NTL) were reliable most of the time. Except during heatwaves. Their repeater boxes that you see on pavements are dark green in colour, and dark colours absorb heat more so than lighter colours, so they knacker up in heatwaves.

As for bill increases, I was paying £25/month on NTL's middle broadband tarif from 2002 to 2006, then when Virgin took over, I noticed that friends and family were paying £20/month for the same service. So I called Virgin to query this, why I haven't been moved to £20? They said that I was on an old contract but they could move me over, so I did. It was probably a mistake on my part in the end, because the £25 was fixed from 2002-2006, but the new £20 rate was only fixed for a couple of years, then it started going up by about a quid per year. In 2018, I was paying £34/month, and in 2019, Virgin said that it will be going up to £38/month. I could ignore yearly increases of £1, but £4 was too much to ignore.

Next up was to cancel with Virgin, which was an obstacle course on the phone as they try every trick to keep your custom but managed it ok in the end. It made cancelling with AOL seem like a walk in the park :D

Then I went with ADSL (or VDSL I think it's called now?)-based providers. Once you're with ADSL providers (as opposed to cable), you can easily switch once a year to keep the monthly rate at around £25.

Now though, I have switched infrastructures once again to 5G and I pay £17/month for unlimited (true unlimited) data with Three. Currently getting 450mbit down, 50mbit up with an ms of 42, but on a good day (normally late evening), I can get 1.1gbit.
 
fez said:
Good timing from VM. Just as they have told everyone their bill is about to go up by around 15% and as there is more competition than ever.

I am switching to a new Fibre provider as soon as I can. Called up VM to see what deal they could offer and the woman on the phone could only offer me **** deals and scoffed at the fact I was switching to another provider that was cheaper and far faster because "how do you know they will be reliable". :rolleyes:

This could cost VM a lot of money.
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Got them to cancel our price increase but as soon as a fibre provider covers this area then I'll be gone.

Had to get through to the second layer of cancellation before they offered me a decent deal with no contract extension but looking at hotdeals you get the best prices by cancelling and waiting for them to call you.
 
1. If posisble for you to leave, such as getting a recent price hike, then tell VM that you want to leave
2. Decline any slightly better offer given
3. VM will tell you there's a 30 day notice period for leaving. Accept.
4. During the 30 days, VM will contact you and offer you a better deal.
5. Either accept or look for a different provider.

You can always call VM back up and tell them you no longer want to leave
 
Bit of a random question this but i've been having trouble with the Virgin wireless signal in my house (still running a superhub 2) and was wondering whether switching it to modem mode and using a third party router would improve the quality of the signal ?

If so does anyone have any recommendations for a good wireless router to pair up with the superhub 2 ? got about a £100 ish budget
 
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imtoooldforthis said:
Bit of a random question this but i've been having trouble with the Virgin wireless signal in my house (still running a superhub 2) and was wondering whether switching it to modem mode and using a third party router would improve the quality of the signal ?

If so does anyone have any recommendations for a good wireless router to pair up with the superhub 2 ? got about a £100 ish budget
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Call them. They want to ditch the SH2 anyway. We were on one for ages but kept getting intermittent issues that I couldn't trace to anything else. Engineer took one look at it and went to the van for a replacement.
 
I was a loyal VM customer for many years( since they took over NTL), around a year ago I moved house. Checked before I moved and they said they provided a connection there. Upon moving, guy comes out and all of a sudden it's not possible for them to provide a connection. They then proceeded to charge me a fee AND a huge whack of my remaining contract, hundreds of £££. I will never use them again and tell everyone I know to avoid them. Generally don't comment on stuff like this, but VM are a terrible company and deserve everything they are getting
 
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I've had loads of them, Virgin was good when we had it (going back to 2008ish though) but haven't had it since. Talktalk I can safely say will never get another dime from me, same with Plusnet. Sky was quite reliable but on the odd occasion I had to get hold of them they were an absolute dumpsterfire to deal with. I've been with Community Fibre for about 3-4 months now and I'm seriously impressed, if they keep their prices competitive and their service doesn't go the way of Sky then they've probably got a loyal customer for life.
 
imtoooldforthis said:
Bit of a random question this but i've been having trouble with the Virgin wireless signal in my house (still running a superhub 2) and was wondering whether switching it to modem mode and using a third party router would improve the quality of the signal ?

If so does anyone have any recommendations for a good wireless router to pair up with the superhub 2 ? got about a £100 ish budget
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100% go down this route. You can probably pick up a decent Asus router for cheap on fb marketplace or guntree. Even routers that are 5-6 years old will beat the super hub for WiFi signal.
 
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