virgin internet down for 6 days, no prewarning, apology to attempt to keep me

19lottie82

Friday night my internet stops working. Saturday morning its still not working, I re set the router, no joy. Saturday evening still not working, and neither is my catch up TV so i call up to see what the problem is, expecting it will be a short term fault.

I was told it would be fixed on the 27th, that's six days from when it first went down! I explain this is not acceptable and why wasn't I prewarned? I'm told they will pass me over to customer service. I sit on hold for fifteen mins and then I'm cut off. Fuming is not the word!

I then call up to cancel. The girl asks why I'm cancelling and I explain the situation and also say I have a half price sky code. She then offers to reduce my package by 86p a month! Not good enough I tell her. OK fine your cut off date is 22 July.

I'm pretty disgusted tbh. I have been with them six months and pay them on average £70 a month. We will see if I get a call from retentions? Or maybe I'll send a letter to the head office, do u think there is any point?

Tia x

paulwellerfan

if your not happy with the service then leave. vote with your feet.
other than that insist that they not bill you for the service you havent recieved.
i have been with them for a few years and they have always tried to sort out any problems and offered refunds.
good luck Op

Miss_Poohs

That happened to us last weekend - the Internet went down, no catchup, no recordings, so hubs called and after all the usual turning boxes on and off they old us there was a fault and we'd be Internetless for at least 4 days!!! Course hubs ranted a bit and they offered him £10 refund......but the service was back to normal the next day...odd

Quiet_Spark

If you have been with them for 6 months, they don't have to "try" and keep you because they already have you locked in to a minimum 12 month contract (or possibly longer depending on what deal you have).

If you can't live without the internet for 6 days, then you may want to look at getting a dedicated lease line in that offers a minimum SLA.

As far as getting money back, it would be quite reasonable to ask VM to refund you for the partial loss of service for the 6 days (and they will if you ask them).

19lottie82

Oops meant I had been with them six years not six months!

kwikbreaks

Assuming you didn't go through "thinking of leaving" and speak to retentions then I'm betting they'll call you. If you are definately leaving then you need to get ordering now as the lead time on BT phone lines can be quite long and you'll be needing one for pretty much any other type of internet. If you don't want to pay for the line you'll need to find an ISP that will install one free - BT and TalkTalk will plus maybe others.

Nilrem

If it's "just" the internet and catchup down then it sounds like a possible fault with the UBR (possibly just the upstream side that receives the data from the customer).
In which case it's a fairly major issue to fix - from memory it's a very expensive part (£100k+), and they don't hold many spare, not to mention it's a fault that needs a specific class of engineer to fix*, so not something the normal installer/repair guys can deal with.

Unfortunately as a consumer level service you have no particular SLA with VM for the internet (from memory if it was the phone line they're meant to fix it within a set limit), so the best you can hope for is a refund of the days for which you were without service and a good will gesture.

As has been said, if you go through the "thinking of leaving" options you may get a nice discount for the next few months.

Personally (and as someone who could be called addicted to the internet:p)l, I would not take any hasty action and leave VM over this - enough of my friends have had much more serious problems with their ADSL to make me very wary of swapping - normally VM can/do fix things that cause your internet to be down within a day or three (depending on if you call Mon-Sat), whilst ADSL can have delays before an engineer is even booked.



*I think they only have a handful of teams to deal with UBR issues, including upgrades and complete failures.

19lottie82

I did go through the thinking of leaving option, and they offered me less than £1 a month off my package, if I signed a new 12 month contract!

I tweeted the Virgin Media CS rep and they directed me to a social media query form, online. Then said they hoped they could persuade me to stay and someone would be in touch soon.

jb66

If you have a half price sky code just leave

19lottie82

Good news, managed to strike a deal with virgin..

I signed a new 12 month contract and they gave me

£30 credit on my next bill
Upgraded my broadband from 20mb to 30mb
Gave me a new superhub and waived the £20 fee

And

Reduced my bill from £60 to £49 a month
:T

eportdave

!!!! virgin, there !!!!. i hate the tv set up, its awful. get your self to sky. i think there awesome. and a friend of mines husband was made redundant recently so they had to cut back a lot, they rang sky to cancel and told them why, sky then gave them 6 months FREE, every channel.
Iv been with sky for years, never had a problem.