Virgin Media’s ADSL Broadband Users Given TalkTalk Marching Orders

Customers of Virgin Media’s defunct copper-line based Virgin National (Virgin.net / ADSL2+) broadband platform, which were last year informed that they’d been sold to low cost rival ISP TalkTalk (here), have started to receive their migration notices with details of the planned move.

The non-cable Virgin National service peaked at 275,900 subscribers in early 2011 before suffering repeated declines until it was officially closed to new customers in October 2013 (here). Since then Virgin Media’s owner, Liberty Global, has focused all of its efforts on their existing cable network and thus few were surprised when the operator finally announced its intention to sell the remaining ADSL base (97k).

At the time details were in short supply, although TalkTalk did inform ISPreview.co.uk about their expectation that many of the affected customers would now be able to take their superfast “fibre broadband” (FTTC) packages (previously they were limited to Virgin’s slower ADSL2+ service). Virgin Media has since setup a dedicated Information Page for those affected.

According to MSE, related customers (i.e. those that haven’t already jumped shift after the first announcement) have now begun receiving letters to confirm their migration date. Apparently the move to TalkTalk will be conducted in a phased way, with the first customers being shifted over during mid-February 2015. This process is expected to take several months and should be completed by the spring.

However this information appears to be at odds with what subscribers have told ISPreview.co.uk. Some customers state that they’ll actually be moved this week, with related emails arriving last week and stating that “Your Virgin Broadband and Virgin Phone services will move to TalkTalk’s network in 3 days from the date this email was sent. There might be a short outage but this should only last 20 minutes or so“.

We also note a few cases where Virgin Media ADSL customers were cut-off in December, possibly as part of an early test, only to later be told that the transfer was unsuccessful and as such they’ve been left without a working broadband service (mercifully such situations appear to be quite rare).

In other cases two customers report that they were able to escape from Virgin Media’s ADSL platform in early December 2014, yet despite this the cable operator has apparently continued to charge them as if they were still providing the service (i.e. payment notices going out for the Jan-Feb period). A quick call to Virgin’s support team is often all that’s needed to get such admin blunders fixed.

It’s interesting to note how some of the affected customers complain that the first they heard about the move, which was announced in November 2014, was last week when the second migration notice began to circulate. Never the less we wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that a significant number of Virgin’s ADSL base have decided to flee before the move, which will probably show up in TalkTalk’s future reports.