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