I have previously been with Virgin Media, and only switched my internet to BT as, at the time, my work required me to have a BT line, and I was wasting a lot of money having 2 phone lines, the Virgin Media and the BT. I was generally happy enough, even though signal-to-noise faults happened quite regularly until they replaced my old, damaged coax cable.

After BT announced their April 2017 price rises I spoke to them to try to negotiate a deal so that my price wouldn't increase. They flat-out refused, as I was still in my minimum term (even though I could have, and then actually did, leave).

I went back to Virgin Media, and the whole transfer process was unnecessarily complicated and lengthened by Virgin's and BT's incompetence and arbitrary timescales, not to mention the fact that Virgin's activation system was down when I was installed, and they gave me a broken router first of all!

Once I was online, I started noticing issues with the connection. I have a VoIP FritzBox! for calling overseas relatives, and it worked fine on BT, but not at all on Virgin Media. The pings were also ridiculously high and variable (see https://i.imgur.com/yHn7WXcl.jpg), which was making SSH, gaming and WhatsApp/Skype calls difficult or impossible.

I reported the fault as soon as I noticed it, and to be fair to them, they sent out a first engineer very quickly. But that engineer claimed to have fixed it, when they hadn't really. I had to ask for another engineer, for which I had to wait a while. The same happened again (it was even the same engineer!). I was then told that an Area Manager had to come out and look at it, as it was beyond the normal technician's abilities.

Three times I was promised the attendance of an Area Manager. Three times the same normal engineer as before turned up, and once even in the morning when I'd arranged for the evening.

When I started making noises around 3 or 4 appointments in, they weren't taking it seriously - they were just giving me loss of service credits for the time the fault was there. After 5 appointments I was graciously allocated a telephone appointment with a certain high-up Steven, who was supposedly a master problem-fixer with an amazing track-record.

The problem was, this was nearly 2 months since installation, and I was still struggling to use the internet service for basic things like SSH and VoIP. And the earliest appointment available with Steve was nearly 2 weeks off.

I finally called in to submit a formal complaint, as it was getting ridiculous by this point. Instead of letting it go all the way, the agent I spoke with recognised that I was a problem customer and agreed to let me cancel free of charge.

Now I've just got to fight over the billing, to get a total refund of everything I've paid - I'm not paying for a service as awful as the one they provided.

Let's not forget their technician's hollow promise of a free TiVo V6 box, as the huge Samsung 500GB box they tried to install wouldn't fit. Nope, £120 + £5/month. Ha!

I'm also going to have to spend a very long time trying to understand how the hell that bodge, also known as my extension phone wiring, was done. The very definition of s**t.