Virgin on the imposible? (virginmedia.com)

Member Name: RPnecroranger

Product:	virginmedia.com
Date:	22/10/08 (38 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: clear lines (if your lucky to get fibreoptics)

Disadvantages: communication is a little lax in certain departments

I have been a customer of this company since it was telewest. And, at the old house, I had very little trouble with their service as a whole. I still don't... but we did have some rather huge hiccups and a very big mess when we moved using their moving service.

I use their xl packages. Now these are great and work fantastic for my family of 7.

TV : We get a V+ box (records live tv & works like a recorder) a extra set top, All the standard channels, Movie channels, sports (which my 13 year old boy and 9 year old lass are glad of) and the kids channels. The biggest bug bear I have is really the virgin/sky money argument that lost us Sky One, but then my mate has Sky and a DVD recorder and helps out if need be!

Phone : meh, its a phone... the service is no different to the basic, just more bells and whistles financially

Broadband : we get a lovely crystal clear 10meg line which is lovely. OK so some of this is down to Virgin vigilantly replacing all their standard cables with new fibre optics. We kinda need the full bandwidth... we are RPG gamers!

Our dealings with the moving service:

Right this is the interesting part!

We gave a months notice we are moving. The nice lady on the phone said "Yes is great, there is cable in the area, we can disconnect and reconnect on the same day you move!". Of course if we hadnt beleved that we wouldnt have paid for a game subscription.....

The day before our move we had a phone call from Virgin. There was a problem. All we were told was there was "rubble in a hole" and they would "call us as soon as it was fixed" with a install date. Oh my.

We were without telephone, TV and internet for 10 weeks! We made repeat phone calls, where no one seemed to know what was going on, although it was evident the problem was a lot bigger than 'rubble in a hole'. On week 9 we actually called BT and got a quote and were deciding if to take it or not (They wanted a £100 +vat connection fee whereas Virgin were obligated to refit us for free)

We gave them 1 more day.... and then a very nice man from the complaints department gave us a ring, full of apologies, took our complaint statement, ran rings up and found out exactly what had happened, where, why and where the work had got too (which is all I had wanted all along!) and the following week we were installed.

It turned out there had been major flooding damage from the connectors (which are just over the road) into town (around 1 mile of cable) and the cable had been damaged. They had needed to replace it (with fibre optics!) but because the conduit they used was a shared one with the utility companies they had had to wait for:

planning permission
water & waste
electric
gas

The wait became clear and understandable, but our complaint about not being kept up to date was upheld.

They were really nice and basically gave us 1 month free services for the trouble, and because I have a virgin mobile they gave me the odd credit for that.

last week they had a huge outage which lasted all of 24 hours for about 3 areas (including ours) however we did get the idea it was a HUGE issue and they worked through the night to get it fixed.

Overall, services are great, their complaint system is quite good and as soon as they fix the little problems with their moving service... well. We will see

Summary: moving was never so easy.... lie!