Avoiding Virgin Media
You're a student on a technical degree with need of a high speed, reliable, internet connection that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
You notice that Virgin Media serves as a viable option to do meet these requirements. With a fast setup and relatively cheap unlimited internet to your door with no line rental what could go wrong?
The short answer is; a lot. Too much in fact. Since day one the router firmware failed to update correctly so despite the helpful engineer coming to install the service it remained unusable until we decided, by chance, to perform a factory reset. Additionally on day one their online activation service was down so it was only after performing numerous phone calls that we were able to activate, which turns out uses the same system that was down, so even a Virgin Media employee was helpless to assist.
Then you see that amazing 50mb download speed that you'd only dreamed of until this point. Then the fun begins. The sub-standard Virgin Media Superhub that you are supplied with may as well be a soldered blob, it's useless on wireless. With frequent drop outs, slow downs and packet loss you also get the joy of a minute amount of the 50mb bandwidth that you pay for.
From then on it becomes a battle to do downloads in non-peak times, often being faster on a mobile. Rather than admit there's a fault on your service on the status page, it seems Virgin Media are content with you thinking this sort of rubbish is normal for them. After ringing up the staff seem unaware of any issues, yet on the Forums there are numbers referred to and fix dates. However, the first fix date was for a different problem. The other problem was due to be fixed 2 days later, neither have sorted it.
It's a bit of a wasted effort writing this so I'll stop there. But this isn't acceptable - even if they'll refund on a substandard month. They won't rebate for 5 months of poor service which is entirely their fault.
I can't help but find it hilarious that they're advertising new speeds in Reading of 100MB and 120MB for users. They can't even make 10 at peak times. I could actually go and buy a DVD on amazon and have it arrive before I could watch it on Netflix.
You notice that Virgin Media serves as a viable option to do meet these requirements. With a fast setup and relatively cheap unlimited internet to your door with no line rental what could go wrong?
The short answer is; a lot. Too much in fact. Since day one the router firmware failed to update correctly so despite the helpful engineer coming to install the service it remained unusable until we decided, by chance, to perform a factory reset. Additionally on day one their online activation service was down so it was only after performing numerous phone calls that we were able to activate, which turns out uses the same system that was down, so even a Virgin Media employee was helpless to assist.
Then you see that amazing 50mb download speed that you'd only dreamed of until this point. Then the fun begins. The sub-standard Virgin Media Superhub that you are supplied with may as well be a soldered blob, it's useless on wireless. With frequent drop outs, slow downs and packet loss you also get the joy of a minute amount of the 50mb bandwidth that you pay for.
From then on it becomes a battle to do downloads in non-peak times, often being faster on a mobile. Rather than admit there's a fault on your service on the status page, it seems Virgin Media are content with you thinking this sort of rubbish is normal for them. After ringing up the staff seem unaware of any issues, yet on the Forums there are numbers referred to and fix dates. However, the first fix date was for a different problem. The other problem was due to be fixed 2 days later, neither have sorted it.
It's a bit of a wasted effort writing this so I'll stop there. But this isn't acceptable - even if they'll refund on a substandard month. They won't rebate for 5 months of poor service which is entirely their fault.
I can't help but find it hilarious that they're advertising new speeds in Reading of 100MB and 120MB for users. They can't even make 10 at peak times. I could actually go and buy a DVD on amazon and have it arrive before I could watch it on Netflix.