On Saturday 11th September, a Virgin Media engineer came to my house to install 10MB fibre optic broadband and TV. The installation took approximately 20 minutes, not the estimated 2 hours. I was given a booklet on how to set up the Virgin Wireless Hub and I was online extremely quickly once I’d gone through the setup.

The first thing I did was head over to speedtest.net to check the speed. My speed registered as 9.75meg. I was perfectly happy with this. However, one of the first things I noticed was many websites taking a long time to load. Sites that weren’t particularly graphically heavy. Fruit Bytes also wasn’t loading as quickly as usual. A few times I’d get a message in Safari similar to those when my internet has disconnected.

After mentioning the issues I was experiencing on Twitter, some suggested it may just need time to settle or perhaps it was DNS related given that some sites loaded but others didn’t. Over 24 hours later things still weren’t improving and I had to reconnect my o2 Wireless router to hop back onto o2 for simple web browsing as Virgin was taking a frustratingly long time.

On Monday I called Virgin tech support to explain the symptoms and the chap I spoke to seemed to immediately understand what the problem was. He was broad Scottish so I found some of what he said difficult to understand but too much power and signal was mentioned. He said he would get a technician out to me and seemed fairly positive that he would be able to sort the problem out.

The technician arrived yesterday afternoon. I took him into the office to show him some of the sites that were lagging. He tried to log into the root of the hub but couldn’t remember the password. He gave up on that and took a look at my TV signal via my VirginHD box. He didn’t explain much (or anything) to me, other than muttering “that’s too low” as he went outside to the box. When he came back he said he’d changed levels and that should sort out my internet, but we came back upstairs to test it. Once again sites were lagging. He said he would “get onto the network” and said that I might see engineers going up and down the street as they work on it. But I was still slightly confused – would they contact me to tell me it’s fixed? Did I need to do anything? I just didn’t know.

So, a couple of hours later I telephoned tech support again and spoke to a pleasant chap who ran a test on the router and seemed to understand what the problem was. He put me on hold while he investigated and came back to say that there was indeed a fault in my area that would be fixed in 24 hours. He gave me the specific house number of a neighbour a few doors away from me who had also reported the issue. I felt satisfied that it was going to be repaired and I could enjoy speedy internet.

This morning I checked the service status page for my area and all services were marked red and showing as disrupted: Broadband, TV and Telephone. The work started just after 10.30am and was estimated to end at 2.30pm. At around 3pm I checked the service status again and it was all green and showing as ‘good’. I tried connecting and then viewing webpages. The lag was still there, often worse. Another phonecall to tech with the Indian call centre telling me a signal had been sent to my router and I was instructed to switch the hub off for 2 minutes while also shutting down my computer for 5 minutes. I carried this out and then after re-connecting nothing changed. I asked to be put through to customer care to find out which date my cooling off period ends as I wasn’t satisfied with the broadband service. I have until 9th October to change my mind.

At the moment it’s looking increasingly unlikely that I will be staying with Virgin Media for my broadband unless they can get an engineer to thoroughly test things at my property. I have been connected to o2 broadband at just over 1.5meg and webpages have downloaded in the blink of an eye. Compare this to consistent 9.5meg Virgin connectivity and webpages will barely load at all. It doesn’t make sense. I can download a track in iTunes very quickly with Virgin, but for browsing the internet you can absolutely forget it.

I would be willing to allow an engineer to call out to me one more time to see if this can be resolved. I would hope that the next engineer would have the sufficient login details for the hub so that this can be investigated fully rather than just checking my TV signal which wasn’t the issue. Right now I’m very disappointed in Virgin Media and can’t quite believe I’ve been hit by such problems from day one.

If anyone can offer any advice on this, perhaps if you’ve suffered similarly with Virgin and more importantly how it was resolved I’d very much appreciate it.