Wow! Virgin Media impresses me (for once)

[Dos_Box]

We currently have what is called the Virgin Media XL package which is basically 10Mbps broadband, XL tv (lots of channels you'll never watch or care about), a Samsung cable receiver/DVR (V+ box) which is very slow, clunky and has enough recording space for not very much (I suspect it had an 80GB HD) plus landline. For this we pay the princely sum of £54.90 per month.

Then last night we saw a Virgin ad promoting their new packages and all of a sudden it seemed like we were getting a rotten deal. They have a 50% off for 6 months for new customers promotion running, but forget that, even without the discount, their new packages beat ours hands down.

Not wanting to take this lightly I rang them this morning, and a week Tuesday they are coming to fit a 500GB Tivo box, upgrade the broadband to 60Mbps and fit a Virgin Superhub (ah well, we can't have everything as neat as we'd like) as part of the new Premier package (Fibre Optic Broadband | TV | Phone & Mobile Bundles - Virgin Media Shop)

All this comes in at £51.80 per month as I get a loyal customer discount of about 15%. I'm very impressed with them for once, so if any of you are on the old packages I'd give serious thought to checking out the new 'collections' packages. Be warned though there is an installation fee of about £45 for the new kit.

Can't wait

[mattx]

I had their customer services ring me last week........on a complaint I made a WHOLE YEAR ago. I kept the poor person on the end of the phone for 30 mins whilst I read out my entire list of complaints regards anything Virgin. I didn't get time to ask why a return flight to NY is almost a grand more than BA.......

[Norphy]

You're lucky, when I called Virgin with the exact same complaint about three years ago, the response was "That's the package you've got, be happy". Never mind that I'd been with them for a decade at that point. They lost me as a customer that day.

[Davit2005]

So if you do get things changed be prepared for initial issues after the install, I guess there is a reason they can provide these quick cheap packages.

 

A while back I was with Cable and Wireless, then stayed when they changed to NTL then to Virgin, all technical problems for me started when NTL changed to Virgin. I left because of the lousy support and service. A previous schools LEA had the internet provided by the same Virgin, the support was no better for the 25K per annum we payed, say no more :-( .

 

I went back to Virgin for home ISP thinking the support couldn't of got any worse. I was wrong but thankfully I have not had any issues apart from the first day after the install. The experience of trying to explain the basic ping tests I had performed to isolate the problem on their end to a complete level 1 support person based in a FOREIGN call centre was almost enough to bring tears to my eyes. Then they had the cheek to put me thru to a company that was going to charge me £35 for taking a look at my setup. Needless to say everything worked fine the next day, magical overnight fix again :-?

 

The first thing I do now is pull the mains from the cable modem whenever I have a problem or things are slow, normally sorts it without a painfull support call.

[synaesthesia]

Quite likely going to take these idiots to court if they don't release me from contract a whole 2 months early due to several issues. The service though, on whole, isn't actually *that* bad, that I've noticed. It's just the customer services which is ridiculous. An email was fired off to BBC Watchdog last night, cc'd into Virgin so hopefully they take notice.

 

Good to hear someone's getting something decent out of them, mind!

[mac_shinobi]

Quite likely going to take these idiots to court if they don't release me from contract a whole 2 months early due to several issues. The service though, on whole, isn't actually *that* bad, that I've noticed. It's just the customer services which is ridiculous. An email was fired off to BBC Watchdog last night, cc'd into Virgin so hopefully they take notice.

 

Good to hear someone's getting something decent out of them, mind!

 

Same here, down graded to 30mbps, medium telly and lowest phone package. Been with them for just over a year and I have been a customer of theirs previously for a number of years and all I got was an upgrade to 60mbps, ( which they are doing for everyone ) , no tivo or anything else.

[rich_tech]

Virgin are a much better alternative to BT where I live (BTs routing and wiring means that I am at the edge of the towns main exchange, despite there being one actually geographically more local to me than the one I am connected too, so their speeds always stank by comparison) My wife rang Virgin a couple of times over the years and got us a better deal each time (I only have phone and broadband with them at the moment, im wary of going from sky to them for TV, especially after the time they fell out and we lost out on sky1, which was probably the wife and I's main channel with atlantic also these days).

 

You just have to be persistent I think with them, dont be afraid of making a nuisance of yourself with them if your not happy also, I had months of free broadband and services out of them over the years because they had problems with the UBR I was on, (It would need periodical resegmenting because majority of customers got put onto the same channel on this particular UBR, as soon as it flared up I was on the phone, because I use my line primarily for online gaming, ping and performance meant more for me than download speeds).

[Dos_Box]

I have to admit I have not had a problem with Virgin's customer service. The few times I have had to call they have adressed the problem quite rapidly and on two occasions the technician came a few day earlier than they had arranged, actually I do recall one time we were led around the Mumbia houses so to speak!

In most cases when it came to upgades and changing packages we were in an 'open' contract i.e. our initial sign up period for the previous package had expried, plus we always read the bumf the send though which sometimes includes ways of reducing your costs (hence the 15% off we get) without having to get new packages/services.

[GrumbleDook]

Package arrived today and left with neighbour (not thrown over the fence for a change ... Yodel are improving!), Superhub plugged in, activated, firmware upgrade, converted to modem mode and ...

 

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1926298779.png

 

Got some port forwards and DDNS to check but everything looks good. September will see a free TiVo 1 gig arrive and happy for another year.

[rush_tech]

I never really had a problem with virgin been on there XL TV 10mb broadband for a few years until I clocked the Premiere Collection for an extra £3 a month I got me a 500gb Tivo box and 60mb broadband

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1926323066.png