Virgin Media National

N0cturnal

So I've moved house and thought i'd take my virgin internet with me, only to find that my new property isn't in a cable area, so Virgin arrange to have my old service disconnected and put me on to Virgin Media ADSL Broadband Package M. All fine and dandy, except when I get a mail from them telling me my broadband is live, I can't use it as I get rejected with invalid credentials. So i phone them up and they say its not set up properly and will take another 24 hours. Sure enough within 24 hours, it goes live. Great.... or not so great. Despite being about 1.6km from the exchange, the router is only connected at 2.3mbps. After a few hours surfing on my new connection, and many many "page not found errors" i decide to run a broadband speed test.
The result: 100kbps downstream, 290kbps upstream. I wait a few days over the weekend to see if things improve, but they do marginally, to 130kbps downstream and 165kbps upstream.

The internet is so completely unusable. I have tried talking to sales to cancel but they tell me I will incur a disconnection penalty. I tell them they've sold me a service that isn't even fit for purpose, but they insist i'd have to pay a disconnection fee unless I talk to technical support and let them run diagnostics, and if they find a fault, then I can disconnect for free. I wait 20 mins on phone and speak to technical support, who tell me that they cannot run any tests until after 10 working days because the connection is in "training mode" whereby it tries to adjust to the best speed possible.

So bottom line:
I am paying for broadband service that is only giving me 130kbps, Virgin won't let me cancel without incuring a penalty, and their techies wont help me for 10 days.

Any advice would be helpful thanks.

Oh and to any new potential customers out there... Do not go anywhere near Virgin Media.

macman

You do need to give it 10 days for the router to find the best speed to synch at.
Yo may be on 1.6km from the exchange, but the line length could be far greater. Did you not check the estimated speed before agreeing a transfer to the ADSL service? You're not likely to get anything near VM cable speeds.
Are you running your speedtest using ethernet from the BT test socket? If not the fault may be on your side, (extension cabling, extension boxes, wireless set up, filters etc) not VM's.