Update: Virgin were crap, nothing ever got fixed, and they sent a 17 year old “engineer” who didn’t know what a Traceroute was. We’re now happily on an ADSL line, soon-to-be with the nice folk at Bethere.co.uk.
This is my latest post on the Virgin Media support newsgroup (virginmedia.support.broadband.cable on news.virginmedia.com):
I just had a very interesting 20 minute phone conversation with Jason Golik (see http://www.linkedin.com/in/bungieboy) a senior Network Operation Centre shift manager at Virgin Media.
He got in touch with me via Twitter after I started tweeting loudly about how poor the quality of service and support at Virgin was.
Now, the bad news is that Virgin aren’t going to fix this particular problem with upstream capacity in Bristol until January 4th at the earliest since they have a freeze on engineering work over the holidays!
The really bad news is that the customer support staff on the phones and on the newsgroup would never have told us this! They’d just keep us hanging on with more of this “we have no update on this yet” or “it will be fixed on December 9th” or “Kam will not contact you today” bullshit.
The good news is that there’s someone with an ounce of clue and (potentially) enough power to get problems sorted, and that he’s happy to phone you personally if you make enough noise about the problem on Twitter (because it’s bad PR obviously). So, power to the consumer through social networking!
Unfortunately that’s not enough to keep me with Virgin Media — unless, and here’s a challenge for you Jason — you can get the problem sorted before the morning of December 17th — this Thursday — because that’s the last date I can cancel the installation of the BT line before I’m tied into an 18 month contract with BT.
And I don’t mean just get the problem sorted for ME — I mean for everyone experiencing serious packet loss in Bristol.
Anyone who wants to have a similar conversation can contact Jason by tweeting with the text “@bungieboy” in your tweet. Adding the hashtag “#virginmedia” may also help get you heard.
In a way it’s completely ridiculous that it took 3 weeks to get nothing from VM via the “regular” support channels (even though the NNTP server is hardly your average user’s cup of tea), but that simply by broadcasting my discontent on Twitter, I got an instant and satisfactory response.
Well, satisfactory in that it was at least honest about the timescales. Jason wasn’t able to confirm whether I’d get compensation or free contract termination as a result of these problems, but he did suggest that having documented communications with support over the last 2-3 weeks would help my case.
Let me know your experiences, this will be an interesting one.
Cheers,
Luke
Hi Luke,
Exactly the same issue down in Exeter. This has been going on a month now. Complaint ‘managers’ are absolutely useless and all that is offered is a ‘free month’ here and there. When it comes down to it, Virgin as a company are selling a fundamentally broken service which will not be working correctly until 2010. I was blown away when I was told this over the phone. Absolutely shocking stuff – mainly due to working at a large ISP myself and being part of planning for hardware to meet demand.
I also had no option but to demand a fix within a week or I simply have no choice but to go back to BT and ADSL – who would have thought that some old copper line could give fiber optics a beating.
It’s a real shame as I’ve sung cables praises for the past 2 years but now it’s beyond a joke, it’s 2009 and I can barely browse to BBC news when I return home from work. Seeing all the over utilized UBR issues banded about on just this technical newsgroup alone makes me no longer want to be a customer of Virgin.
Yea I had 21 months of packetloss, sorted for 2 months and now it’s back again. I’ve been given the runaround by support several times.
All the communications and pathetic apologies are available in vm support cable – search for BS15
Z.
20% packet loss for several weeks is definitely grounds for you to terminate your contract with NTL without having to pay a termination fee, if they won’t have it, threaten them with the regulatory body.
http://www.pingtest.net/result/5640638.png rubbish company – been like this for ages now (poss six weeks)
how do I see BS15 in vm support cable ?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Luke Marsden, Osira. Osira said: @SoapyJ – no u need to follow @lmarsden- "Virgin Media respond to my complaints on Twitter with a phonecall – http://bit.ly/5RtsSD " has it [...]
Having the same issue here for the past two weeks, outages at the same time daily. I’m wondering if this is all related to them rolling out their new traffic spy solution.
This all started a while back when the first deep packet inspection boxes were rolled out and a network reconfiguration followed – look at your FQDN = new!
Some evenings my “L” connection was below 6 kbytes/sec with 30% packet loss. Since the merger with NTHell Virgin has been on the skids – my feeling (backed up with years of firewall / router data) is that network throughput has been shaped to align the product with marketing sh1te rather than max-ing the native capability of the system and building out – granted connection numbers have risen and TV has got a lot worse but… you get 100Mbit in many countries that does what it says on the tin for a fair bit less than VM’s defective product – and sensible, honest support too.
They are monopolists who want to spend nowt and ransom access to a resource – plain and simple. And they’re developing a very full on big brother snooping system too – after all the hollerin about BT/PHORM snooping – Virgin are getting away with sneaky snooping without any trouble from the media at all…..
Wheres the dreads gone, beardy?
I moved house recently and after 40 minutes wait on the customer support line I got hold of someone and let them know that I was moving. They said fine – no extra service charge – we will send you a document to sign before proceeding with the transfer of service.
One month later, I have no internet, no phone line, noone has yet contacted me, calling their support line from my pay as you go mobile costs something like £1/min so I gave up after the first 20 mins of waiting, their local Bristol branch kicked us out because they are closing at 18:00 and I went there at 17:55 after work, while at the same time claiming that our property is recorded in their system as “demolished” – nevermind the building was build in the 19th century and has never had structural changes, AND they have billed us a peculiar extra £35 last month as “service charges” to what I suspect is a service transfer fee – which never happened. Oh, and the Bristol branch guy insists that we cannot break the contract unless we pay for the full year for the wonderfull service that they have provided to us. I wonder if it gets any shittier than this.