Virgin media advertises non-existent double speed

Impavidus

I am one of many Virgin's disgruntled customers and I thought my experience may be useful to others, also if anyone has any suggestions please feel free.
A few weeks ago I Virgin started advertising a free double speed download upgrade, but since that ad went out I had nothing but problems, culminating with a 5 day total cut out (I have had to resort to using a neighbouring hotel to get on line as I need to do so for business reasons). What I found shocking is the following:
a) impossible to get to talk to anyone with information on the outage - all they give you is vague updates that inevitably turn out to be useless as the service so far has not been restored by said times.
b) impossible to get any re-dress (nobody knows how to deal with these matters)
c) when I checked the small print in my contract it said that they could suspend the service at any time for essential maintenance (I wonder how many people are aware of this?)
d) I contacted Ofcom who registered a complaint and also advised me that they could legitimately cut me off for up to 10 working days.... (again how many people are aware of this?)

To add insult to injury this morning I received a letter from Virgin saying that the have upgraded my service and double my speed, which being zero now it's obviously easy to achieve.

I don't know how else I could get redress from them but beware of this company...

bod1467

Indeed. 2 x 0 = 0

kwikbreaks

Impavidus wrote: »

To add insult to injury this morning I received a letter from Virgin saying that the have upgraded my service and double my speed, which being zero now it's obviously easy to achieve.

Nowhere has the doubled speeds yet. What you've received is the marketing hype saying that they are going to double your speed.

Beetlemama

Oh they're going to more than double ours too - but not till 2013.

The flier said something like "I was floating along in my balloon the other day..." bleugh.

Buzby

Their website gines you the estimated date of the doubling in your area. It's basically like all VM's claims - you'll hear about it long before it becomes available, but at least it DOES come to those that wait.

daleski75

Patience is a virtue with VM but they do get there in the end.

mazza111

When the outage is fixed, call VM back up, tell them how many days you've not had any internet, and they will refund you this amount.

marleyboy

I cannot say I have had any major issues with my VM BB. I seem to remember when they had a double speed a few Years back we had one or two glitches for a day or so until our speed was doubled.

However they have not doubled speeds as yet, and as it is planned for mid Feb before we all have it, as has been said, patience is a virtue. Up until then, I am happy with my speed and service just as it is, another double up for nothing is hardly going to disappoint me.;)

Beetlemama

So, now we're getting a FREE upgrade, did you all get the letter this morning saying your bill was going up £3.50 a month? My "upgrade" doesn't get here for a year but my bill increase comes in April. Yay.

Geoff_W

Beetlemama wrote: »

... did you all get the letter this morning saying your bill was going up £3.50 a month? ...

No, my letter stated an increase of £1.50 per month, but then, I only have a phone & broadband package (no TV).

Mind you, that'll still push the monthly cost to £29.90. I'd dump them in an instant, but BT lines at my location can only deliver around 2Mbs, although I understand we are getting FTTC in June (the cabinet around the corner has just been replaced with a shiny new one!)

Nilrem

Beetlemama wrote: »

So, now we're getting a FREE upgrade, did you all get the letter this morning saying your bill was going up £3.50 a month? My "upgrade" doesn't get here for a year but my bill increase comes in April. Yay.

You mean the same time of year they normally do a price increase?

The price increase would happen with or without the upgrade in speed - you don't mention what package you're on, but every year our price goes up a couple of pounds or so (which is roughly in line with inflation and the amount Sky put up the price of Sports/Movies).



Impavidus:
If you're reliant on the internet for business reasons get a Business line.
It carries an SLA that is suitable for business use (IE guaranteed fix in X time, or a backup connection of some sort), the standard VM product is for home use, and carries an SLA that OFCOM agrees is suitable for a home internet connection (much the same as BT will have a similar one).
IIRC even with phone lines there are a couple of SLA's depending on the nature of the fault and how hard it is to fix.

Any telecoms company will have a notice in the small print that the service may be unavailable due to essential works - there is no way to do some works without it*.
Unfortunately it sounds like your problem was major - I've never had an outage here (in 11 years with NTL/VM) that has lasted more than a few hours except when the main hub/center for our town's cable was flooded (IIRC a day or two outage, which was sort of understandable).

It sounds like in your case it was either very major, or very hard to locate and fix - unfortunately cable thieves have been having great fun stealing the cable that the likes of VM use in some areas, even when it's not copper they take it/cut it to check which causes the outage.


*Ideally if you're in a business and really require internet access you have two connections from different ISP's, preferably different service types to avoid an outage due to something like BT's ADSL center going down (IIRC a year or so back one of BT's main ADSL hubs fell over affecting customers of any ISP using a particular part of BT's network/service).