Virgin take over AOL billing

Eleanory

Last month AOL took £9 as a direct debit instead of the usual £24.99. They did not send me any communication to tell me why. This month my Virgin bill listed Broadband £24.99. I phoned them to say that I don't have Broadband with Virgin. They said that AOL are using Virgin's lines now so Virgin would be billing us. That was the first I had heard. I cancelled my direct debit with AOL and recieved an email telling me to contact their customer services, which I did. After listening to six sets of options I was cut off. I replied to AOL's email to say that I couldn't get through to their customer services, providing my telephone number and asking them to call me. They have not called me. My internet connection has been problematical since then. Has anyone else had this problem? :mad:

Jake'sGran

My Internet connection has been weird for a while.I keep getting little boxes at startup referring to Dial-up even though I have broadband. My son in law told me last week that Carphone Warehouse bought AOL UK so, in view of your email, I am even more confused.

Fortunately, after doing a cleanup of my computer it is now working well and the little boxes are not so frequent. AOL did send a message say that their systems are being re-done (something like that) and I just need to bear with them. BUT, quite by accident last night I read about something called
Firefox FTP which they say means you don't need a service provider. Going to look into that today and see what it is all about. If you Google it you might understand it better than me.

Ivan_Konstantinov

Jake'sGran wrote: »

BUT, quite by accident last night I read about something called
Firefox FTP which they say means you don't need a service provider. Going to look into that today and see what it is all about. If you Google it you might understand it better than me.

Firefox FTP is just to upload or download files,films or other data. You will still need a "service provider"

superscaper

As Ivan says, you'll always need a service provider otherwise you have no way of connecting online. Not sure exactly what you read about Firefox FTP but I'm guessing you misunderstood some terms they must have used.

mdbarber

Normal practice is for the isp to bill you, not the "wholesaler", are you sure someone in the house hasn't arranged a migration?
seems a bit odd as aol and virgin are in direct competition in many areas and aol/talktalk/cpw have their own digital backbone provider!

Jake'sGran

superscaper wrote: »

As Ivan says, you'll always need a service provider otherwise you have no way of connecting online. Not sure exactly what you read about Firefox FTP but I'm guessing you misunderstood some terms they must have used.

I did think it was strange - and too good to be true. I will try to find where I read it.

Omertron

You should have received a letter from Virgin Media about this. They have bought out AOL's Broadband service (they were always the wholesaler anyway) but AOL have decided to get out of that business and sold it to Virgin.

lab-lover

I am with AOL, havent recieved anything saying its now Virgin. as far as i knew it was carphone warehouse now.

superscaper

Jake'sGran wrote: »

I did think it was strange - and too good to be true. I will try to find where I read it.

Well it's merely a file transfer app and nothing to do with internet service providing so I know that either they won't say that or they'll have got it wrong. It's no different than saying something like using Outlook Express means you don't need a service provider. It's only an application for sending data over an existing internet/network connection. There's no getting around having to have an internet connection in the first place in some form.

BexTech

Carphone Warehouse (TalkTalk) bought AOL UK.

Maybe the OP had AOL over a cable-broadband network and not the usual over the BT line, and maybe those cable AOL customers are now going to be billed by Virgin Media as Virgin Media customers.

BexTech

Jake'sGran wrote: »

My Internet connection has been weird for a while.I keep getting little boxes at startup referring to Dial-up even though I have broadband. My son in law told me last week that Carphone Warehouse bought AOL UK so, in view of your email, I am even more confused.

Fortunately, after doing a cleanup of my computer it is now working well and the little boxes are not so frequent. AOL did send a message say that their systems are being re-done (something like that) and I just need to bear with them. BUT, quite by accident last night I read about something called
Firefox FTP which they say means you don't need a service provider. Going to look into that today and see what it is all about. If you Google it you might understand it better than me.

Yes, you have broadband, this is ADSL, yes it's an always on connection, however as you are using a USB modem, windows pretends to dial-up hence the dial-up window. The number it dials is 0,38 this connects you to the ADSL broadband.

If you had a router, you'd enter the 0,38 in the setting and the router would behind the scenes keep the connection connected, you wouldn't need any dial-up boxes etc.

You don't actually need the crappy AOL software.