Posts tagged Virgin Media
Faster than the speed of light
9Three weeks ago I had 10MB Virgin Media broadband installed and have been enjoying a super fast connection. Since the service has been so good I’d been considering upgrading to their 30MB package but had to take into consideration the cost of their Super Hub which is required for 30MB and beyond speeds, costing £75.
Last Wednesday I received a call from Virgin Media with a broadband deal for me: 30MB broadband, free for the first 3 months and free Super Hub. I simply couldn’t resist this offer and the hub was delivered to me on Friday.
I just had to swap my hub over, call their activation line and then wait 15 minutes before trying to connect to the internet. This was probably the most pain-free installation process ever.
I checked my speeds via Speedtest.net and it was coming in at 29.35Mb/s down, 3.07Mb/s up. I was very impressed. A quick check of my speed today and it’s showing as…
I’m really thrilled with 30MB broadband and am looking forward to downloading some movies from iTunes to put it through it’s paces.
Like a virgin, for the very second time!
3Last year you may remember I tried and tested Virgin Media Broadband after experiencing problems with my o2 Home Phone and Broadband. Sadly I ran into frustrating issues getting websites to fully load on Virgin, if it all, and cancelled within the 30 day cooling off period. I had little choice but to stick with o2 who I was still having many problems with, but several perplexed engineers later it seemed to magically resolve itself.
One week ago my o2 broadband was once again disconnecting at an alarming rate. After calling them and getting the usual “plug into the test socket and we’ll check for faults” I couldn’t help thinking last year was going to repeat itself all over again. One engineer after another scratching their head trying to work out why my service was flakier than a flaky thing, all coming to the conclusion that everything was fine and that I should take it up with o2 again.
Because I didn’t relish the thought of having no reliable service for the foreseeable future, I took the opportunity to call Virgin Media to enquire about their broadband once again in the hope that any problems that did exist in my area were fully fixed 12 months on. Friends and family have been switching to Virgin within this time and have had a superb service with them. Because I have their Large TV package with Sports collection, I can get 10MB fibre optic broadband for around £15 per month. I was able to choose self-install as I have all the cables at the back of my TV which the hub simply needs to be plugged into. This saved me £40 on an engineer.
I then received a phone call on Wednesday from an “o2 Guru” who said a fault had been discovered at my local exchange which would be fixed within 24 hours. It was 4 hours later after I arrived home after taking that call and noticed my connection had been down but was also running faster, at around 3.5meg. This, for me, is fast. So, just two days before I was due to have my 10mb fibre optic activated I found myself with a fully working o2 connection – typical. However my delight was short-lived as come Friday not only was my broadband down but also my home phone! I didn’t care too much as I’d just taken delivery of my Virgin Media Hub and my connection was up and running.
My experience second time around with Virgin Media has been wonderful. I visited all the websites I had problems with last year and there they all were, downloading in a snap. I ran a speed check and was getting 9.85meg. Fantastic. My contract with o2 Home Phone and Broadband ended in May, so I’m now fully free to move all my services to Virgin Media and will be doing so when I choose the right telephone package for me. I’ll also be upgrading to their 30MB broadband because of the bundle discount. I would be signing up as soon as possible, but the telephone installation will cost £40 plus another £30 for the Super Hub to support 30MB broadband. That can wait until my next big bill or two is safely out of the way.
Like a Virgin….
40On 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.
From o2 to Virgin
181 year ago
For three years I’ve written about my experience with o2 Broadband. All sickeningly positive, praising the reliability of service, speed and customer support. Because of this experience I switched my home telephone provider from BT to o2 when their home phone service began in the Spring. It was this move that heralded the beginning of the end of my love for o2. It’s a long story, one I shall attempt to condense into a few short paragraphs.
Since switching to o2 Home Phone and Broadband my connection has been terrible. Really terrible. It began almost immediately from my switch-on date of May 20th. It came in the form of many disconnections initially, to much slower speeds, dropping from 3.5mbps with reliability to 1.5mbps with disconnections as often as every 30 minutes.
Many telephone conversations have taken place between myself and o2 Broadband in the last 3 months and sadly the relationship has continued to deteriorate. Within 6 weeks they send me 2 brand new routers (o2 Wireless Box II), sent me new filters, changed the noise margin on my line to see if that would provide stability and I have had no less than 3 BT telephone engineers to my home to check and repair faults. All these engineers left my property satisfied that the issue was resolved. Only it never was.
o2 Broadband told me that once they’ve run all the tests they can on my line, they will send out a Broadband Engineer, not a telephone engineer. Last week we reached the point where the tests were completed, but the last conversation I had with them was the final straw. I was told, by a lady at o2, that I would need to have 30 disconnections an HOUR before they would send an engineer to me. Yes, 30. It was clear that with my current rate of re-syncs that they just were absolutely unwilling to do anything more than fiddle with noise margins and repeatedly talk to me like an idiot, asking “are your filters plugged into your sockets?”.
So, despite still being in contract with o2 Home Phone and Broadband until May 2011, I have signed up to Virgin Media to receive their 10MB Fibre Optic cable broadband (and TV package). I will get 3 months for £15 per month for my broadband then £20 per month thereafter. This means I’ll still be paying for an o2 Broadband service that I won’t be using, from o2. It’s not ideal since I should be receiving a service that I’m paying for, but o2 have let me down really badly and have had little choice but to seek an alternative.
As many longterm readers know, I’ve been a huge advocate of o2 Broadband the entire time I’ve been writing here. I have converted many friends, online and offline, to o2. Now I am advising to avoid like the plague. When it really matters and you have a problem, their support just aren’t prepared to send the necessary engineer to resolve the issue. Their advert about nobbling broadband niggles is now laughable. And their telephone message when calling for technical support is equally so…
Did you know that many o2 broadband connection problems can be fixed by switching your broadband box on and off?
Ah if only, o2, if only.
So, after 3 years I am finally waving goodbye to DSL with o2 Broadband and when my contract expires in May I shall also be taking my home phone needs to Virgin Media. I hope that I have a better experience with Virgin Media and that support will acknowledge and deal with problems should they occur. From what I’ve been told by friends who are already with Virgin, it seems that they do technical support very well. My installation date is Saturday 11th September.
My o2 Broadband [rating:0.5/5] AVOID AVOID AVOID
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