Can I port my landline telephone number to virgin media?

Samyounis

I've been told today, after weeks of trying, that Virgin dont allow you to transfer numbers across accounts, that i can i like it lump it. That would have been fine so long as i hadnt been promised that it was possible when i opened my account.

I've wasted countless hours on the phone with advisors (most of our on hold) talking to a call centre based in India where, as well-meaning as they may be, they have no clue, such poor training and so difficult to communicate through their thick Indian accents.

The only native English speakers i came across are in sales to give the (rather deceitful) impression that advisors are based in the UK.

On multiple occasions I've had the phone hung up on me because I've gotten frustrated or might have asked a difficult question (does no one monitior this? Clearly Virgin thinks it's okay for their call handlers to just hang up on customers ...its becoming routine)

I have wasted so many days on the phone now being transferred from department to department of incompetent people, told outright lies to fob me off, given misleading information, told id get a callback only to never hear from that person again.

I even had a call from the "chief exec's office" .... only to never hear from that person again. So i guess it really is leading by example. They call from a non-specific number so it's impossible for you to call anyone back.

No one takes ownership of an issue and the customer is like a ping pong ball getting batted around one clueless department to another (I've literally had an advisor say"i don't know why I've been passed this to call you...")!

I've had 3 routers in the past week without any guidance necessitating a change in all my family's passwords and on all the other gadgets in the house, the family are soo annoyed, i could cry at the number of times I've put in this awkward password into various devices. And I've not even got round to changing my number at the doctors and kids' schools, the vet, the gas and electric company etc. yet.

On top of this, apparently Virgin only offer telephone lines that plug into the router to new customers. This means if your internet goes down (frequently the case with Virgin I've found) then your phone goes dead- you can't call the Emergency services, no ambulance, police or fire fighters. Cheers Virgin, I'll just burn to death. And yes- you came install an emergency backup line- but guess what.... bingo! - it doesn't work. And when i tried to call to tell you, i had to give up after waiting on hold for 40 minutes.

Moral if the story: avoid Virgin if you want to take your phone number across with you....
and God help you if you need any help through customer services.

Hope this helps anyone in a similar position.

Wish I'd never left Sky.

keef-WhatStandards

Some years since I left VM, but I did manage to port a number out, so in theory you should be able to port one in.

The secret of getting anything done with a complaint/query in VM is, just as any company these days, go to the top. I managed to sort out a few problems, but I always did things in writing, rather than over the phone. Things with VM may have changed of course. I left as they said they could no longer offer me a "deal" and have been changing ISPs regularly since.

[Deleted User]

Samyounis wrote: »

I've been told today, after weeks of trying, that Virgin dont allow you to transfer numbers across accounts, that i can i like it lump it. That would have been fine so long as i hadnt been promised that it was possible when i opened my account.

I've wasted countless hours on the phone with advisors (most of our on hold) talking to a call centre based in India where, as well-meaning as they may be, they have no clue, such poor training and so difficult to communicate through their thick Indian accents.

The only native English speakers i came across are in sales to give the (rather deceitful) impression that advisors are based in the UK.

On multiple occasions I've had the phone hung up on me because I've gotten frustrated or might have asked a difficult question (does no one monitior this? Clearly Virgin thinks it's okay for their call handlers to just hang up on customers ...its becoming routine)

I have wasted so many days on the phone now being transferred from department to department of incompetent people, told outright lies to fob me off, given misleading information, told id get a callback only to never hear from that person again.

I even had a call from the "chief exec's office" .... only to never hear from that person again. So i guess it really is leading by example. They call from a non-specific number so it's impossible for you to call anyone back.

No one takes ownership of an issue and the customer is like a ping pong ball getting batted around one clueless department to another (I've literally had an advisor say"i don't know why I've been passed this to call you...")!

I've had 3 routers in the past week without any guidance necessitating a change in all my family's passwords and on all the other gadgets in the house, the family are soo annoyed, i could cry at the number of times I've put in this awkward password into various devices. And I've not even got round to changing my number at the doctors and kids' schools, the vet, the gas and electric company etc. yet.

On top of this, apparently Virgin only offer telephone lines that plug into the router to new customers. This means if your internet goes down (frequently the case with Virgin I've found) then your phone goes dead- you can't call the Emergency services, no ambulance, police or fire fighters. Cheers Virgin, I'll just burn to death. And yes- you came install an emergency backup line- but guess what.... bingo! - it doesn't work. And when i tried to call to tell you, i had to give up after waiting on hold for 40 minutes.

Moral if the story: avoid Virgin if you want to take your phone number across with you....
and God help you if you need any help through customer services.

Hope this helps anyone in a similar position.

Wish I'd never left Sky.

Can a Mod please move this nonsense to https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=82

cranford

The poster put this on the VM community help forum abut 3 weeks ago and got help from a VM staff member. Not the help they wanted thought. Just to make it clear it was a planned transfer from one VM account to another at the same address, not from another provider.
I know its a pain to tell contacts that you number has changed but I used it as an opportunity to change most to my mobile number and porting mobile numbers is not an issue. Many can be done online and getting rid of the old number stopper nuisance calls at a stroke.
As for having to change passwords on devices when new routers arrive I don't think this is a big deal to moan about when its for your own protection and hardly an issue to have a go at VM.

wongataa

Samyounis wrote: »

I've had 3 routers in the past week without any guidance necessitating a change in all my family's passwords and on all the other gadgets in the house, the family are soo annoyed, i could cry at the number of times I've put in this awkward password into various devices.

There is never any need to do this. First of all choose your own Wi-Fi network name. Connect to the router and change the Wi-Fi network name to the one you have chosen. Choose your own Wi-Fi network password. Change Wi-Fi network password on the router to the one you have chosen. Make sure all devices can connect with the new details. Whenever you get a new router spend a couple of minutes changing the Wi-Fi name & password on it to the ones you previously chose. All devices will connect to the new router with no issues.

Neil_Jones

There are a very small minority of devices that "know" it's not the same router even when you reuse the same SSID and password (I used to have a computer wireless network card that behaved like this) an need reconfiguring, but fortunately that's rare now.

But yes, never stay on the default SSID because it's rare that two routers will have the same SSID and almost unheard of that they'd have the same encryption key, although I suspect they're randomly generated anyway.

Where I sit now I can run WifiInfoView and see 33 wireless networks come up, and all bar two of them clearly advertise the ISP being used - EE, BT, Sky, Virgin, TalkTalk, Vodafone... The only two that don't do this just happen to be mine (but then I'm not using an ISP router anyway).