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virgin media are crap

Virgin Media – Diluting the brand and the board

Virgin, the brand what does that mean to you..

Are you looking to fly the Atlantic, or become a space tourist, or are you a concerned saver of the Northern Rock bank, in such cases virgin is probably a positive association, innovative products, good customer service etc., indeed these are the aspects of customer service that has made the virgin brand so valuable to Sir Richard Branson… however the problem with allowing others to exploit you brand is that they may not value your principles to the same degree.

virgin mediaA case in point, Virgin Media…

Virgin Media until yesterday when I finally snapped was my ISP and cable TV supplier.

For the past year or so since the combined Telewest/NTL companies have been known as Virgin Media, the quality of their customer service and more importantly the quality of their actual service has plummeted.

Through under-investment and poor technology choices their cable TV PVR system has become a running joke, rarely running for more than 24 hours without crashing, poor quality images (Dumb choice to use MPEG2 as a broadcast standard), and only a single HD channel due to bandwidth constraints.

The final straw for me has been the appalling quality of the virgin media broadband offering, I have been paying £37 per month of their top of the range product “XL” which should offer 20Mbs download delivered via their dedicated fibre network, sounds a good if expensive proposition does it not… well for the past couple of months this is the network performance I have been consistently achieving with virgin media..

Speed test

Yes that’s £37 per month, for just over 1 Mbs .. well no longer.. I’m off to O2 broadband who can also offer 20 Mb/s over DSL, so I say farewell to Virgin media and join the last UK based director of the company who left the company today.

BTW Richard, if you don’t want mud all over you nice logo be careful with who you let use it !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

19 replies on “Virgin Media – Diluting the brand and the board”

ive been with virgin media for last 8 months. Cust Service was nothing special.

Im XL as well (no tv – 27/mth) and noticed recently that the speeds have been dropping.
Is that thinkbroadband test a 1-off test, or a log of your speed over a period of time?

I will test mine later.

Customer support does suck (unless you use the newsgroups, they provide great support), TV is useless, I cancelled that a while ago along with the phone (switched to vonage), luckily my broadband speeds aren’t bad, I hit 20mbits quite often (but I generally use it late at night, partly to avoid the stupid usage cap).

I currently get XL for £33, after threatening to leave, my only current complaint is I can’t access NASA WorldWind’s servers, they claim it may be ‘bogon filtering’ and are investigating.

But I do agree since Virgin took over things have gone downhill, to be fair though Telewest was pretty bad too.

Hi Simon,

It has been poor since christmas, the 1.1 Mbs is the worst I must admit, usually its around 3-5 Mbs…

I’d be interested to hear your experiences

ed

did a couple of speed tests and was hittin 15-17mbs. Still not 20 but nothing to cancel about. I didnt realise Virgin throttled/capped the XL service. Any links to the criteria regarding this?

Does anyone else see the irony of your blog ripping into Virgin Media running alongside a Google advert for, yes, Virgin Media?

Yes 2GB.. that would be a HD Movie rental from iTunes.. ah yes I can see why Virgin might not like that.. who needs net neutrality then

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