Category Archives: Bad Shops

This category is used to discuss online or bricks and mortar retailers who demonstrate poor customer service in one way or another.

Virgin broadband service ….

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My house is getting brought into the 21st century. (I’m typing this on the floor, with a mouse mat and keyboard wobbling on top of the PC box, surrounded by binbags full of mouldy books, dishes and raw food detritus) This has wreaked havoc with my capacity to even switch on my PC, let alone comment meaningfully on the Virgin Media service, but I’m going to do it anyway.

It may be that the random moving of cables and the cable modem are to blame. So, I’m still not confident enough that I can justifiably phone up and berate the relentlessly chirpy Virgin Customer Service operatives.

All the same, I’m going to badmouth the service here. 10 Mbit seems to being interpreted as 10 Mbit amonth, as far as I can see. The connection keeps randomly going off. This is so irritating because it makes everything I try to do on the Internet – like post to this blog – depressingly unpredictable. I am reconnecting to Microsofdt messenger at least two or three times an evening, and whole days have passed without me being able to connect at all. Grr.

If anyone else has had a similar experience, I’ll suspect it’s not just me. So please can I have some comments? Also, if every other ex-Telewest customer has perfect service, I’d like to know so I can sort it out here rather than embarrass myself complaining about faults that turn out to be mine. (Tech support in work would probably say there was no surprise there)

Random Virgin broadband service

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Bah. After years with Telewest, during which the broadband Internet service was pretty damn good, a few days of Virgin being in full control and I’m tearing my hair out.

An outage yesterday – when I actually had a free day to go on the net in the hours of daylight – had me disassembling my PC and mixing up the network connection to my switch because I first assumed my PC was at fault. Then I thought that I had stopped ithe connection working by changing the network cards’ connections to the switch so I randomised these again, then forgot what was connected to what when I started .

Someone phoned up Virgin for me and found that there was an official outage with another 4 hours to go. So my PC had been fine till I started trying to fix it…..

When I phoned up after the official four hours I got an unremittingly chirpy recording that suggested that I reboot my PC and the cable box. Obviously I had tried this about 8 hours earlier, and several times since. But I tried again. Nothing.

This morning, there was still nothing. I came back at 7:30 pm and still had nothing but this time I made my PC reconfigure its network settings and drop its IP & gateway etc. and I connected the PC directly to the cable modem box. (Goodbye, switch. It looks like one PC at a time from now on.) It worked.

Elated, I got online for at least 40 minutes, before the service decided it was too much trouble to keep connected to the Internet and switched off again for five minutes. I have no idea how long it will stay on now.

Losing Sky One is one thing, there are always other alternatives.. (Thanks to Nullfidian for the link to Virgin’s page that explains what TV there will be.) A crappy broadband service would be completely different. It might be a pure coincidence that there happened to be a local service failure in this area at the start of Virgin’s control. I will give them the benfit of the doubt but will be sure to watch the service closely for a while to see if it gets back to Telewest standards.

Virgin Disconnect

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It seems that no only have virgin media dropped Sky channels from their TV service but their broadband customers have had a major outage today (at least in the North West).

To put the icing on the cake, complaints this morning (around 1000hrs UK time), were given a “four hour” ticket which (ten hours later) is still unresolved with no feedback.

What a wonderful way to retain customers. I was looking at going for a cable package, mainly because people (generally) said good things about Telewest. It seems that since it became Virgin Media things have gone down hill in a massive way. (Seems to resemble the trains really… Look pretty, cost a fortune but just as crap as ever).