Virgin Media

Finally I quit them. Big saga and never ending phone calls. The troubles started when we moved from a cable to an non cable area. Here is a little chronology what happened:

• We moved house in December 2007. We notified Virgin well in advance that we would move
• After moving, the phone line was up and running ok, however, the internet was not working
• We got a letter stating that we have changed, but no other information was provided
• I started to phone Virgin regarding the internet connection, however finding the right contact number proved almost impossible. Since I had an account with their cable services and they have not yet figured out the joys of serious DB programming, I had to go to great lenghts to explain them who I was and what I wanted.
• On one of the phone calls, the operator literally confirmed to me that we are just stupid customers that they can milk.
• They could not explain to me why the services were not switched from the previous owner to ours. I had to ring BT, who provided the line. A competent technician from BT enlightenend me.
• They finally managed to send me a (useless) router, without any further information
• I had to ring them again regarding my passwords for connecting to the internet
• After about 40 hrs on the phone to them, I finally got connected to the internet
• I was able to check my bills online through ebilling, when suddenly access to the webpage stopped working and some message came up that it was their fault and they are working on it. That message was up for a about 2 months.
• I rang them up again and wanted to change the settings. They said all their servers were down and they could not do it. Apparently never heard of replication at Virgin.
• So I sent them an email where they promised they would get back to me within 48 hours. The mail was sent about 2 months ago. Clearly Virgin measure 48 hrs with a different time scale.
• So I started to look for a new provider and found one in TalkTalk
• I rang Virgin to tell them that I am leaving them. So the operator finally put me through to a technician who then said the Netgear router had a problem with the driver and that is why we got disconnected from the internet a zillion times per day. But they would not notify their customers that this is the case and ringing them up was a nonstarter for me after my 40hrs phone marathon. And he was very good in slagging off TalkTalk that they would not be able to provide the MAC switch for me in such a short time blablabla etc.
• My (hopefully) last call to Virgin was today, requesting a final bill. I rang their standard number and went through all the verification procedure only to find out that she had to connect me to another operator since she could only deal with cable customers. Which of course meant going through the whole verification blabla again. Maybe Virgin should really get some good DB and Webprogrammers to make their customer interaction frontend a bit more useful.
• All I wanted a paper bill but they said they could not provide me with a bill. And since my account was closed, I could not get access to it via ebilling either (which I could not since Feb this year anyway). But she was magnanimous enough to give me the number and the date of the final bill.
• If you want to complain to them, they make it really hard to contact them.
• And now for the funniest bit: I complained to OFCOM and here is the reply I got: Thank you for contacting Ofcom. We have identified an existing contact record in our system that matches the email address you specified in your complaint, but has different personal details. In order to ensure that we have accurate contact information for you, please could you reply by email providing the following information:
  
  • Your full name
  • Any previous name and postal address details that you may have used when contacting Ofcom
  
  *** Please do not reply to this email. This email address is only used for acknowledging receipt of consumer experiences *** ---- Hilarious. Please reply by email and please do not reply to this email. The UK at its best!!!!! Sorry, been to many countries that the UK looks down upon. They definitely run their services better than this.

Now we are with TalkTalk. It is like heaven. They sent us a welcome pack. They sent us a set up CD and a router that is working. I could log into my ebilling services in no time. They spelt my first name wrong and got it corrected within 24hrs of sending an online request to them. We can work from home again. Everything is transparent and easy and despite the Virgin technician warning me that the internet would not work, we could connect on the day TalkTalk promised we would go online.

Conclusions:

Keep your fingers off Virgin at any costs. If I would charge Virgin for the time I spent on the phone with them I would still be phoning and surfing for free. I have had bad internet services before, but Virgin beat the competition easily. It is like a nightmare over after leaving them. So, do not even think about using Virgin for any services. The experience will undoubtedly be bad.

As for OFCOM. They are probably paid by Virgin...