Virgin Media Reviews

Virgin Media was once good.
But lack of investment in infrastructure and massive uptake by new customers has slowed the broadband to a halt. Their 30Mb service often performs at 1.4Mb download and just 0.31Mb upload. My mobile phone is faster. Customer service is a joke they deny problems exist and fob you off with any old excuse. Its expensive to break your(18 month)contract early. Check out virginmedia community forums there are thousands of complaints on slow speed.
At last VM have admitted a fault, its going to be fixed soon March then April then May then June now July. I wont hold my breath but will be leaving for BT Infinity at the end of my contract as will thousands of others.
Do yourself a favour give this dreadful company a miss there are better broadband providers.

Please bear in mind that this relates to the Edinburgh staff and network.

Good:
-Their installation service is really good. The staff are friendly, quick and knew their stuff to get everything set up with the slightly weird cable situation we have in our block of flats. They're even very respectful of your house, pulling on these slipper type things over their boots to protect your floor and cleaning up any mess caused by cables and installation.

-The DL/UL speed for me has been very consistent most of the time. On their 60Mbs package and there's a problem if I'm getting less than 55Mbs. I just ran speedtest and got 62.8Mbs which is consistent with my experience.

-Their line quality is fine most of the time. My ping is usually 20ms or less and I've never seen jitter go above 3ms.

-Their tech support is above average. Tier 1 is... well, as incompetent as Tier 1 usually is, but they didn't freak when they remoted into my computer to find Mac OS (and they're using TeamViewer so it both worked and was trustworthy). Once I got passed to Tier 2 over a line fault that wasn't corrected but just on my street, they saw the problem and it was fixed within 5 minutes. However, the tech noticed some problems on our router and scheduled a technician to come next day and run tests. He arrived on time, agreed our router may be faulty and replaced it there and then.

-I'd give the network a reliability of about 98%, estimating less than 2% downtime/serious line faults. Not brilliant but better than my previous ISP.

-Email, while never used, is just skinned GMail with all the benefits and pitfalls that comes with.

Bad:
-The "SuperHub", oh jeeze, the SuperHub. ~3 hours it will just decide to hang for about 30 seconds then continue on fine, except it destroys facebook, skype, games, torrents, downloads etc. This isn't a network problem, it's just their horrid router. A new one is now out though, and it seems much better, plus VM customer service can bend over backwards so it'd be pretty easy to get hold of one if you're an existing customer and have a problem.

-The network, while decent, has been hit with a couple of outages lasting more than 4 hours. The problem however is their service status info is VERY unreliable, with my postcode giving different results to my customer number, making diagnosis of any problems harder.

-18 months with them, writing and emailing at least 5 times, and mentioning it on EVERY call I have with them, they still address bills and literature to a wrong name (they've appended "-amon" to the end of my name) and refuse to change it. Doesn't affect payments or anything though.

-Some billing problems at the beginning, but they were eventually sorted and refunded.

-Although their line is good and DL fantastic, U/L is only 3MBPS (admittedly all that's promised, but far lower than BT Infinity for example). Furthermore, the line's hit or miss for online gaming for unknown reasons

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.

After being their customer for around 12 months, with a reasonable connection (good speed, reasonable latency, few faults), I decided to cancel my Virgin Media service, since I was moving to an area with no cable.

I of course expected this to be no problem, since they would not be able to offer the same service where I was moving to. Not for Virgin Media. In their view, the fact that I'm moving is my fault, and I was expected to carry out my full 18 month contract or face early termination fees.

My two options were, apparently, to either sign up for a new 12 month contract (!) for an inferior service (ADSL only, and no TV) or pay early termination fees. After much arguing and many attempts at reducing the amount to be more in line with the reduction of service I'd be facing, I gave up, coughed up the entire sum, and swore never to use their services again.

They have gained around £180 in termination fees, but they've lost a customer for life, even when I invariably move to an area with their cable service.

Where to get started?

Customer services were arrogant, couldnt speak a word of english and kept ignoring questions.

Service quality is poor, TV / phone AND broadband kept going down EVERY other week.

Stay away from these crooks as all they care about is your money.

I have Virginmedia XXL package.

In general it worked (past tense), customer service is appalling. Most annoyingly, they allow you to contact them from the web page, but the response is always useless, and they always tell you to contact by phone. That is true even about the most simple question.

It got worse lately. They have a fault since 23 Oct 2012, which they are aware of. As a result I get less than 1% of the speed that I should get, most of the time much less.

On their site it constantly reported as known problem, and that it is fixed that they just do tests, and that it is going be resolved in XX, where XX is several hours in the future. They change XX each few hours, so it is always not far in the future.

Calling their customer service is useless, because they just say say:" well it is going to be fixed shortly at XX".
It has been like that since 23 Oct 2012, i.e. 16 days by now.

Either they just don't bother about fixing it, or it is a serious problem, but they cannot be bothered to tell you that. Either way, it is totally unreasonable.