Virgin Media Reviews

Earlier this year I upgraded to the Gig1 service, after receiving the Hub 4 and getting the service up and running I immediately found it not to be as expected and wanted to revert the account under the 14 day return policy, however at this point the country had gone into a state of lockdown and making contact with Virgin was proving impossible despite efforts being made via Phone, Text and also Web Chat.

I finally got the service reverted to M350 however changes that where said to be immediate then became a 30 day waiting period which has now cost me another £21.

Customer service have said that as no calls where logged for any issues that a credit would not be issued and further more said that Virgin no longer credits for partial losses of service.

I have since been told I can have the activation fee of £35 back and also that my contract will be removed from the account (which is ideal as Openreach start extending their Full Fibre FTTP towards me starting 22nd June.

After 10 years of being a customer I've finally had enough of this behaviour and thought paying £62 per month would finally see better service from them but that was wrong.

UPDATE: Complaint is now resolved with activation fee and unwanted services refund and service terminated.

Link to forum Hub 4 review https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/review-gig1-customer-service-hub-4.36423/

DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY!!! In December I finished my contract early with Virgin Media as we were moving. I paid the full £157 ahead of the usual billing date, I was subsequently double billed by Virgin Media when the usual direct debit is taken (There billing system does not recognise customers that have already paid their bill). Over the past 6 months I have contacted virgin media close to 10 times. Each time they have said they will send through a cheque returning the money. However, nothing has been received. I'm disgusted by the behaviour of this company and it's apparent lack of regard for the law and lack of regard for it's customers.

Their broadband product for the most part is good, I don't live in an overprovisioned area so I will easily reach 380-400 mbps on a 350 mbps connection, the problem lies with the rest of Virgin.

Their Hub 3 router is just awful, I've been complaining about it for years due to it's many issues. Notibly the Puma chipset causing high latency spikes and their plaster fix causing P2P to easily drain the speed out of your connection.

It's admin configuration page is not at all good, I've seen it forget my password or sometimes crash out and stop loading.

The best you can do is put the thing in modem mode and use your own equipment beyond it which doesn't fix the chipset issues.

When trying to get support Virgin is very useless, don't be suprised to have the person on the other end not understand you, give you wrong advice or hang up. Recently I've been having an issue where my router randomly restarts, which has been a lovely back and forth which required two engineer visits to be told it's a network-wide issue, according to the agents the issue was fixed after the first engineer visit despite no work being done, agents promising credit but then saying I can't have it, callbacks being promised but never delivering.

If you have a decent alternative I'd go with that, Virgin's network can be very fast but at the same time the rest of the company lets it down.

I am so tired of VM to be honest but there don't seem to be any alternatives that can offer the speed we need locally. I am paying for a M200 high speed service and yet my speed test results fluctuates between as low as 20-25, a couple of months ago and as high as 180-185 today. We still have an old Virgin 2 media hub which is garbage and never been upgraded and our monthly bill for broadband and a single line rental with no more than £5 of calls is £68-£75 and they are increasing our monthly charge yet again on Sept 1st by another £3.50!! They really are taking the p!! If anyone has any suggestions that can give me good download speeds without buffering when streaming from Amazon or Netflix then please let me know. Virgin has become expensive garbage - they might be able to afford Usain Bolt and fancy ads to shill their brand but the day to day reality tells a different story as their service provision is terrible!! If I could have given you zeros I truly would. Virgin don't give a damn about long term customers that is very apparent - their customer call centre is a joke and the best deals are always kept for new customers, who they spend a fortune to entice to their network and yet the clients they have already are treated with total disrespect and left with out of date equipment and price rise upon price rise.

Mind you I am an IT Engineer with unusual internet requirements and this review probably isn't suited for the average consumer.

Where I live I can get Openreach FTTC at 80/20, or Virgin Media HFC.

I've been using Plusnet which gives me pretty much the full line speed, but it is starting to struggle when I'm trying to stream 4K content over the internet. That's why I thought I sign up for VM hoping to benefit from their faster internet speed.

I was issued a VM Hub 3.0, which I'm using in modem mode, along with my home router RB3011.

Blocked services:
I have a L2TP VPN server in the home network so I can remotely access resources at home. Turns out Virgin Media filters out several UDP ports (including those used by L2TP), this behaviour was discussed on VM forum but not acknowledged by VM. Also, this is not documented in the ISP KFI document issued by VM.

Speed:
Artificial test shows roughly 385 / 21.
HTTP download tests from third party sites appears to be traffice shaped - sustained speed at 200Mbps, with bursts to 400Mbps. The raising and falling edge is too sharp for me to consider it being traffic on internet. VM appears to be still traffic shaping although claiming not to.

Bottom line: VM is blocking ports (verified) / shaping traffic (?) but they claim to be not doing it. Questionable business practice. Will be cancelling within cool off period.

The product is good; high speeds, reliable.

But the customer service department is awful; awkward, argumentative, dishonest. This wasn't one employee - I have had three problems over the year and needed to make countless phone calls to try and get them resolved. All three issues had to be logged through Resolver in the end as Virgin's own customer service department are awful. All three problems were solved quickly and to my satisfaction when escalated to a more senior team.

Value for money is okay. There are good deals available for new customers. Not so much for existing ones. And the undiscounted prices have risen to the point of being preposterous, e.g. £51/month for 100Mbps internet and the base TV service.

I don't know why Virgin Media constantly get bad reviews, most of the reviewers seem to focus on a bad customer service experience and can't be bother to rate speed or value for money, and rate everything with a single star.

They have the widest available ultra-fast download speed in the UK (350Mbs). Which is reasonably priced (if you haggle or get a deal) and have a 1 or 12 month contract. So what's to moan about?

I appreciate that the quality of the broadband might vary. In north Leicestershire I regularly get 216-218Mbs from my 200Mbs Download Speed, and in the four years I have been with the company there has only been 2 or 3 days when there has been problems with the network.

I would recommend having the latest modem available, and always ring Customer Service Retentions to haggle for a better price when your present monthly "deal" ends (which sometimes takes three attempts to get a good price)

I rarely ring customer customer services, but V.M. aren't using Indian Call Centres so much, which is good, and usually you are greeted by a UK based friendly operator.

I have just joined Virgin Media VIP package, having come from from BT.
My fixed download speeds are 386 mbps and upload is 21 mbps. I don't use wireless on my laptop but a recent speed test was 258 mbps down. The TV service is superb (Full House) and all in all no problems at all and certainly no cause for complaint. A very happy customer! ;-)

Really awful, unhelpful and disrespectful customer service.

Once Virgin has you forget ever getting help. You'll sit on hold, then get put through to someone reading a script who generally displays no interest in actually doing more than reading the script. Heaven forbid you should ask them a question out of order or that can't be answered on the script. On top of that they are condescending and dismissive on more occasions than not.

Never mind that the services won't work or require extra steps on your part that they don’t tell you. That’s on you to figure you, because clearly Virgin isn't going to help. Really regretting signing up with Virgin. I’m pretty much paying for them to treat me like crap. No service would be better than service with Virgin at this point."

Not a thing has gone well with setting up service with Virgin Media, Virgin Mobile, or Virgin Money. I have what services I have at all due to pure personal determination rather than actual service or help from Virgin employees. All around it’s been a completely horrible experience across the board.

I have been with Virgin media since the early days. I am in general very happy with their no hassle services, speed is always great as I started off with their basic 2Mbps package and has since been upgraded several times to 100Mbps. My only complaint is the price that they charge, it is certainly not cheap for a broadband only package. The router/modem that they provide is decent at the moment, but I use my own wifi router so this is not an issue for me at all. All in all very happy with them.