Virgin Media

Recent Virgin Media installation, including 'speed doubled', 'up to 60Mb/s' broadband.

In practice, never more than 5Mb/s.

Contacted customer support, and the techie says this is a known issue in the area, quite simply Virgin's hardware is overloaded, and they are unable to provide anything like the speeds they are selling. This is not a new issue, but has been known about since 2012. Any upgrade to improve is many months away

For anyone in Salisbury who is suffering, this is not 'demand variation due to peak times', but Virgin in breach of contract.

For myself, this is pure miss-selling - I bought the package by checking it would be compatible with my postcode, the techie could tell me the fault was present via my postcode.

How wonderfully cynical!

So, dont buy a Virgin package of any sort in Salisbury - remember, its not just your internet, its your on demand TV services too. In other words, movie streaming, gaming, Tivo...its all trash.

What can I say about my virgin media experience ?

Worst ISP ever , seriously.

VM staff must deal with lots of unhappy people and are quite snippy themselves.

More importantly, the broad band service ( i had cable ) is unreliable and patchy. 100mbit speed is no good if you cannot keep a connection for more than 5 minutes

As an IT worker, I do understand some of the problems, virgin's super hub is really bad (not sure if its HW/SW or a combo ), but i reboot my super hub 2 or 3 times a day on average. Im aware that modem mode solves this, but needs additional hardware.

Virgin charges allot of money for their services, there is an unacceptable level of outage of both broadband and TV services in my area ( Cardiff ).

So im out of contract and I'm leaving virgin. I used 'moving' option from the absolutely terrible phone support menu so I didnt have to go through the process of being talking to like a child because you dont want to pay them.

I made it really clear i never wanted to do business with them again.
Next day i get a phone call pestering me to take the service at my next address.

David Tennant - you have weakened your value advertising this crap. If you appear on the TV recommending something else I will avoid it, you should have at least tried the service before endorsing it.

Richard Branson - you should also be ashamed of the service that virgin media delivers. Of course he would not care, VM is being sold.

Im thinking of not having broad band anymore, a tethered mobile phone on three is working better than VM !

So 65 quid a month back in my pocket, lower blood pressure , less stress.

Bye VM, never ever again.

I have been on 50Mb XXL broadband for 2 months now. The service was only enabled in my area 3 months ago.
Day or night I can saturate the bandwidth. Steam downloads come down at a fast rate. 15Gb Batman Arkham City (old connection took 8 hours) in just over an hour.
If your in an area where its not had a high take up its perfect!
Gaming is perfect too, 3 of us can be playing online and it never skips a beat. Even in ping dependent Call of Duty. My ping averages 10ms :)
Best bet is to look up there community forums and see if there have been many complaints about your area before signing up.
Ive never had to call support as the connection has been faultless. However the same thing cant be said for the wireless on the superhub, but I configured my old dsl router as a access point and all sorted :) Since Ive done that I have never had to reboot the hub.
I came from BeBroadband so I didn't take this decision lightly, but there service wasn't upto what we needed.

Update 21/12/2012.
Roughly 4 months ago I upgraded early to 100mb. 100mb i do receive! :D
Day & night I can still use up every ounce of bandwidth available to me.
Top notch in SO15 area of Soton.

Update 27/02/2012
Got free upgrade to 120/12 at end of January.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2539092949.png
As you can see I am receiving what I should be still!! :D

Every other week I don't have internet for about 1/2 a day.

New years eve again not internet.
1-st of January again not internet.

Location: London

Prices are updated every 6 months.

I had to get unlimited internet on my mobile so I can use it every time virgin lets me down.

Writing this review while waiting for one of their professionally patronising telephone jockeys to get back to me. To be brief, their cable service is not nearly as good as it should be and frequently offers an array of jaggies, flashes and warps to go with your TV broadcasts. It also gets worse, as the bandwidth decreases as more people in your area sign up. The box re-boots itself once every few days. The internet service is shabby and the email is a very poor adapatation of googlemail which is not really understood by Virgin's telephone teams - for instance, the automatic spam filtering, which you cannot turn off, is the bane of everyone's life. As for customer services, it is the usual queasy mix of pre-recorded protestations that everything possible is being done to improve your "customer experience" and - you guessed it - atrocious customer seervice: slow, ineffective, and so heavily scripted you might as well be talking to a robot. A dire service all round, which sadly I have been too apathetic to change.