At the moment I have a landline from BT, broadband from what was Pipex, and a PAYG mobile on Vodaphone. TV free satellite and FreeView SD. I have an HD TV and get the free HD services from satellite. I'm not a heavy phone user and don't download high data stuff from broadband much.
Virgin have the street cabled, and keep on bombarding me with offers. So I'm wondering if it would be worth putting all my eggs in one basket, as it were? They seem to offer some of the other TV channels I watch in HD too - which would be a bonus. Any comments?
FWIW, I wouldn't give the dirty digger the dirt under my fingernails - and that applied long before the current fiasco.
I have been with Virgin (and their predecessors) - TV, Phone & Broadband
- for over 10 years. In the last two years Virgin have increased the price by over one third. Although The service is good, I can &will) get the same service from Sky for about half the price. Friends do this and have no complaints. I would get any offers in writing before signing up
- they are about to increase theit connection fee for a call to IIRC 12p per call which would put the price of a short local call to over 15p
He rings up every time he has a computer or audio problem.
He was with some ISP that I don't remember, but we got that working.
Someone persuaded him to change to Onetel. What a bunch of shambolic incompetents they were. I think they were the ones who after my 3rd or
4th support phone call said " oh we found that the username we gave you wouldn't work on our servers, so you have to change the underscore in the name we assigned in our Welcome letter to a dot".. They continued to be a disaster so, on being approached by a blonde in the local shopping precinct, he announced he had changed to TalkTalk.
Once again, days of visits and time spent on the support line and eventually he got connected. He spent some time with them with lots of outages and hopeless service. Worse than Onetel.
Then he had Sky for a bit, but he told me the price kept rising and he objected to paying money to that bunch. The service was better than the previous providers once we got it going.
So he changed to Virgin, who he is still with. They dug up his lawn to lay the cable, but had to leave " to do the other jobs we have to complete today". To be fair someone came back a few days later and got the cable in, but the sub contractor hadn't been given enough time for the jobs. We got him connected and all worked well until the recent problem I've been asking about here (see iPad2 thread). "Support" were competent, local and friendly both when I asked them questions originally and recently. For the iPad episode, they replaced his router foc with a more recent model, and it cured the problem. He is impressed with the speed. I've been pretty impressed with the support.
I hate the mess Virgin has made of the trains. I've been priced back onto the roads, so I'll never know if they have fixed the rigid travel arrangements, smelling toilets and narrow seats.
The ONLY thing virgin has going for it is cable delivered broadband.
In every other respect they are below standard of the competitors
If thats the only way you can get high speed connectivity and are prepared to take on board arranging your won email service, DNS service and fault finding your own installation, then its a fair enough deal.
Indeed... treat it just like a dumb bit-pipe and it's fine, don't bother with their extra services.
Virgin service is also quite area dependent. Some local cablecos installed decent kit, some fitted wet string. So ask around locally what experiences others have - and it can vary within an area too (here in south Cambridge it's rock solid, all the problems I hear of locally are in north Cambridge).
For phone calls from the landline they're really expensive (32p/min to Three mobile anyone?), so don't let the cheap line rental lul you into a false sense of security. Maybe it's OK if you stay within the inclusive calls.
Well making a accurate comparison between a railway company and a former cable Telco isn't perhaps that scientific;!..
That said we have used their phone and BB for many years now. The phone has been absolutely reliable no crackles never once off service the only problem now is rising call, and more annoying, connection charges which make VoIP ever more attractive. We haven't had their TV services for many years as here theres not that much of a call for it, we get some furrign TV via satellite which keeps the furrigner here happy..
But generally their broadband is very good the cable delivered version. We have their 10 Meg offering which every time we speed test it its right on the nail, is uncapped and beats most all ADSL services we have elsewhere some of those around 1 or 2 meg on long lines etc and even ones that connect at high rates they are rather slow.
What does let them down is their customer services, they are around the same as BT. However as we've only had to speak to them once or twice in
Phone service is OK ..Pricing isn't that good but use VoIP over BB and sorted;)..
Humm.. Was talking to a couple of people just outside town who'd kill to be on their net, they manage sub One Meg services on their copper delivered BB .. when its going that is!..
Yep got our own domain and e-mail service but very cheap not had DNS problems at all..
And one fault, modem upgrade, in 12 years not too bad...
Indeed... Virgin rail is actually 49% Stagecoach. As in most industries they pay for the brand and slap it on to whatever product, with minimal involvement from Branson. Virgin Media is actually NTL Telewest (of NTHell and similar 'fame') rebranded because NTL was a bit too toxic as a brand (and they absorbed Virgin Mobile at the same time too).
Tony is on a nearby bit of string to me, so our good service reports aren't necessarily independent :) Service has been pretty solid with roughly 1-2 small (few hours) outages per year which usually fix themselves after a modem powercycle. We've had one service call for a modem replacement in 8 years, I think that's been it.
They've got a lot better, particularly if you contact them via their forum where the real techies reside, instead of the 'have you plugged it in?' callcentre. 45 min waits on the phone and 25p/min premium rate support lines thankfully are a thing of the past. The real techies don't always have clue, particularly with things like traffic management[1], but it helps to be able to dump your cable modem stats there and say 'my SNR is low, oi, fix it!'. They can book service calls direct from the forum.
[1] You did know Virgin have traffic management? They managed to screw this up (as a matter of policy) and essentially block Usenet (since it's 'filesharing') for some months: now fixed, but I would watch further developments like a hawk.
Virgin is a former cut price vinyl record vendor. Somewhat in the Big Issue arena. The original venture was a bunch of stoned hippies loading boxed of wholesale albums of trucks onto shelves and equally stoned students making a bob or two buying them in bulk and selling them to their mates at 'uni'.
After that, it became a record company in its own right, and somewhere along the way Branson's image changed from stoned hippy to businesslike entrepreneur, and all the hippies got fired or wandered off in disgust. Feeling had, which they had been. well and truly 'work for almost nothing, its against the fat cat distributors, man, really subversive'
I forget what followed. Stores probably, then aeroplanes, then trains and now media distributions and banks.And a formula one team.
Just a rich boy with rich man's toys. Mostly harmless
It may be uncapped, but it is heavily throttled between the hours of
10am to 9pm. Usenet and Torrent traffic is throttled pretty much all the time now as well.
Customer dis-service is dire (at best). Support is outsourced (mostly to India), news server is outsourced to Highwinds, mail is outsourced to Google etc. etc.
Phone is expensive, TV is nothing special, Broadband is pretty reliable (apart from the throttling), but they use every trick in the book to worm more money out of their customers. Want a paper bill? That'll be £1.50, wish to pay by any method other than direct debit? That'll be £5 per month.
Which network build are you on then?, this ones ex Comcast and quite frankly if it stopped me doing what I want to do with it it'd be junked for Bethere or Zen or similar. We have usually Two Iplayer users with a couple of Skype calls going on most evenings let alone what I want to do with it, so doesn't seem like its throttled to me?.
We do by somewhat unusual means have access to ADSL thats a claimed 8 meg service thats actually 5 meg down usually, and its deffo worse than the 10 meg VM feed...
Well the news we get of E-Sept and no problems except with a SMTP server hiatus last week..
Agreed they seem to me like BT to be shooting themselves in the foot with this one..
Nope we get what we want off Freeview and Sat plus other sats..
BT I believe are the same as are some mobile Telcos...
But Richard Branson and the Virgin Group have nothing to do with Virginmedia ?he simply licenses the brand to them, and is an minority shareholder. It was just a marketing re-branding when NTL,Telewest?merged and acquired Virgin Mobile. But did make Mr Branson ?£961m richer Not too bad for a stoned hippy ;)
Hum, wikipedia (yeah OK) says Virgin Enterprises Ltd he has 10.7% less 37pc so 6.7% of Virgin Media and Virgin Entertainment Investment Holdings Ltd has another 21 million+ Virgin Media common stock making them the 1/3 largest shareholder. Not what I would call a "minority shareholder".
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