
Virgin Media lost me as a supporter - edward
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2018/01/no-more-virgin.html
======
te_chris
The UK is the most frustrating place to live sometimes. The English speaking
world has a shining example of how to not fuck this up in NZ, yet they keep
doing the opposite. Against all sorts of lobbying, the NZ govt. forcibly
separated our telecom monopoly provider into a retail and a wholesale company,
then they put a whole bunch of money up for competitive tender to build a
national fibre network. And it works, it honestly fucking works.

I've got Virgin in London and it's a piece of shit compared to what I had in
NZ. In theory, I have 200mb down, but the uplink is bullshit because they
convert to cable for some unknown reason. I also rarely see the performance
that a 200mb connection should have. In NZ I had, in the first days of fibre,
30 down 10 up. It was always this speed, the fibre terminated at my house and
was more responsive and reliable than what I have now in the UK.

Here, the govt keeps kicking around, getting conned by the industry as they
promsie to upgade things, to be better. It's such a joke.

For reference these are real plans, with reliable speeds, with FTTH:
[https://imgur.com/a/8JeV7](https://imgur.com/a/8JeV7) (divide amount by 2 for
£, take off 30%ish for USD)

~~~
martinald
I don't agree. BT have got to 95% 'superfast' (24mbit+ sec) coverage, with
minimal govt funding. It will probably get to 98% coverage.

Try switching from Virgin to BT/openreach FTTx and you'll probably see much
more reliable speeds.

FWIW I have hyperoptic in London which is ~£45/month for 1gigabit up and down.

edit: keep in mind the NZ project cost NZ$1.5bn subsidy to get to 87%
penetration for ~1million premises. The UK has got to 95%+ penetration
(>20million premises) for £600m ish subsidy. It's literally 20x the cost.

~~~
wastedhours
I live in Zone 1 (less than 1/2 mile from an exchange) and still don't have
fibre, and get less than 300kbps in the evenings with BT some days (max
quoted, 16Mb). Fibre isn't even planned for our cabinet yet, so it strikes me
as surprising we're at 95% coverage.

~~~
dx034
I guess the problem is that so few people live in the city that it compares
for BT to a small village. Businesses usually will have dedicated lines so
it's not really worth going after the few people living there (esp as many use
it as a second home which shortens average contract duration).

~~~
cannam
"Zone 1" is not the same thing as the City -- it has a population probably
close to half a million people.

~~~
dx034
I'm aware of that, but most parts of Zone 1 are still not very densely
populated. And where they do, more apartments tend to be empty or only used
for a few days per week. Residential areas in WC and EC postcodes can appear
like a ghost town on some days.

~~~
cannam
That is true. And I can see the argument that the population density doesn't
really make up for the awkwardness of the territory, especially in older
streets with peculiar exchange configurations.

~~~
martinald
Yes, also keep in mind that central london boroughs/tfl hate allowing
roadworks as they want to keep congestion down, which makes it even more a
pain in the ass, AFIAK they charge pretty ridiculous rates per day per m^2 you
block the road Especially if you have complex duct blockages that can take
many days to fix.

------
Mindwipe
I have to be honest, I think the experience that BT were clear and
communicative would not be a typical experience, and EE themselves admitted
their customer service just completely fell apart last year.

The split between Openreach and ISPs in the UK has been very helpful for
increasing competition in the UK and avoiding the malaise of regional
monopolies the US found itself in, but the one time it presents clear issues
is when something goes wrong with the line. The ISP has very limited
diagnostic options, and a customer cannot speak to Openreach directly despite
the fact it's their cabling that's usually at fault. So you're stuck playing
Chinese Whispers with the engineers looking at the problem and offshore
support, normally with the consequences you'd expect. And the perverse
situation where ISPs have to tell customers they will be charged several
hundred quid for a visit if the Openreach engineer decides that the ISP
supplied router is at fault rather than the line (O2 quoted that line at me
once when I was looking out of the window while a bunch of roadworkers looked
on at the steamshovel they had just wrecked putting it through a main power
line and all our fibre. I was fairly confident the router was fine...).

I had a terrible experience with Sky recently, when my line started to fail
and drop intermittently, something that has happened multiple times before to
me in this property, likely due to weather damage to the poll. Sky tried to
charge me £50 for an Openreach engineer visit despite them not being charged
by Openreach for this. Meanwhile they're trying to charge me for an ISP
service they're not providing. I told them to sod off in no uncertain terms.

------
martinald
Installs that involve new constuction are always tricky to be honest - there
are a lot of moving parts and getting access can be tricky.

The real problem with VM is their massive overselling problem. It is on a UBR
by UBR basis, some UBRs are totally fine and have enough capacity but some are
chronically overloaded. I am luckily enough to be on Hyperoptic now but before
it was a complete cointoss whether at peak times the 150meg or whatever would
go to 1-2mbit/sec with massive ping and jitter making anything interactive
(even SSH) impossible.

At one point they had 300mbit/sec of downstream capacity and 50mbit/sec of
upstream capacity for 100s if not 1000s of users (who could be provisioned at
150mbit/sec). So two users could knock out the entire UBR.

I believe DOCSIS 3.1 will resolve this somewhat as it will allow far more
capacity, but really VM needs to look at much more aggressive UBR segmentation
which is expensive. Or switch entirely to FTTx (which they are doing for some
new builds using GPON), but again, very expensive and many users won't
notice/pay more for the additional quality.

OTOH BT FTTx is super reliable in my experience, with no contention issues at
all (they have at most 288 users on 10gigE backhaul). I would much prefer a
80/20 BT line vs 300/10 on VM simply for the reliability of speeds.

------
n4r9
I've been with VM for a few years as well. In many areas they have far and
away the best speeds [0], but the service seems to randomly drop every now and
then, and the support is hit and miss at best.

In fact, you can tell whether a customer support call is going to be "hit" or
"miss" almost instantly. Half the time you get a helpful, competent agent who
will confirm that you can take your contract with you as you move home and
even looks up whether they can give you a better deal; the other half you get
an outsourced agent who tells you that moving house requires signing up to a
completely new year-long contract.

The billing also leaves a lot to be desired. At one point I got so angry with
them billing me way above the agreed amount that I guessed the CEO's work
email and sent him a personal message outlining my frustrations. The issue got
solved within a week of doing that!

[0] See for yourself -
[https://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/broadband_speed_in_m...](https://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/broadband_speed_in_my_area_v2.aspx)

~~~
dx034
> In many areas they have far and away the best speeds [0]

As always with cable, that depends on the time of day. I was never able to get
anywhere close the maximum speed between 5-10pm Mon-Fri and all-day on
weekends. Download speed was great in the early morning but that doesn't help
because it's not the time I usually use the internet a lot. I switched back to
BT, speed is lower (60-70mbit, although 56mbit were promised) but fairly
constant.

------
matthewmacleod
I've got sympathy – there's nothing worse than this sort of terrible customer
service and lack of communication. It's a shame, because the network itself is
pretty good.

Why do large companies have such trouble scaling customer support? It's
exactly the same whenever I have to interact with any organisation like this –
no callbacks that they promised, missed appointments, work not done on
schedule, that kind of thing. It's got to the point where I will actively
avoid interacting with any service provider unless it's totally unavoidable.

(There are some exceptions – like my energy company Ecotricity have a phone
line with a person on it when you call. It's pretty boss.)

------
dijit
I wrote a blog post[0] about the situation in the UK a while ago.

The British broadband system is quite crappy in general, especially so if
you're on ADSL, but at least it's not the same as America or Canada which is
significantly worse.

Although if you have the money for it I'd recommend springing for Andrews and
Arnold (aaisp.net.uk).. or if you're near Stratford I'd recommend Hyperoptic,
they were able to sell a very, very, stable symmetric 1G connection using the
fibers left behind after the Olympics.

[0]: [https://blog.dijit.sh/the-true-state-of-london-
broadband](https://blog.dijit.sh/the-true-state-of-london-broadband)

 __EDIT: __Reading my blog post with fresh eyes has shown me that I did not
provide my raw data, and I did not elude to the fact that I had been in
constant contact with BT trying to get the line fixed. I should have mentioned
this as it mirrors TFA 's experience with virgin insofar as they were non-
responsive and when on-site looked around and did very little with small
excuses about access to equipment/cabs.

------
bnastic
So I'm not the only poor sod who got shafted by Virgin Media... my example is
probably even worse...

VM send their surveyor to assess my flat. "It's quite high, but if you manage
to drill the holes yourself and get an RG59 coax cable down to the ground
level then our team will be able to connect you". (The cabinet is 20 yards
from the said touchdown point). I spend money getting contractors to do the
walls/roof and buying a long cable.

Long story short, they simply cancel my request. Despite telling me what to
do, and what to buy. And their drone just kept repeating on the phone "it was
canceled. You can't complain to anyone, there is no other department".

Suffice to say, I'm getting angry even as I write this. Absolutely appalling
company. Never buying anything from them, although that 200MBit service had
its appeal... they could offer me 2Gbit for free now, I would refuse.

Internet situation in the UK is a very, very sad story... I am thinking of
getting a microwave internet for my neighbourhood, but all the info so far
points to it being a Sisyphean task

------
Angostura
The absolutely worst thing about Virgin, in my opinion is that the passwords
on their e-mail accounts are limited to no more than 8 characters. No special
characters, no spaces etc.

Form many people control of e-mail represents the final key to their digital
kingdom. I'm awaiting the inevitable news story.

Other than that, the service has had about 2 sub-30 minute outages in the last
10 years.

------
papermule
I have Zen Internet. It is a little bit more expensive than competitors such
as BT and TalkTalk, but the customer service is so much better! It’s all in-
house, run from their office in the U.K.

The Fritzbox! router is fast, reliable, has great WiFi and looks like a
spaceship!

~~~
davidgerard
+1, another happy Zen customer here. The only ISPs worth bothering with are
Zen and A+A, and if I wasn't with Zen I'd be with A+A.

Only minus point with Zen: initial tech support can be a bit clueless at
first. Also, always have a spare modem for testing if you're on DSL.

------
martin-adams
I recently left Virgin Media because their pricing was going up and up and
just not competitive. I later found out they were charging me for a set top
box that I never asked for but installed anyway and I didn't know it was de-
bundled when I downgraded to freeview only services. They deliberately
obfuscate the bill so you don't notice and had the cheek to put it up even
more when the phone number was taken over by the new provider without telling
or informing me.

And the Tivo box they give you is the most infuriating piece of rubbish I've
ever used. Such a depressing state of TV experience.

------
maxehmookau
For me, it's VM or nothing. The maximum speed I can get for broadband in my
area (South Birmingham) is about 4mbps. But I get 200mbps with Virgin for not
much more than the ADSL equivilent.

I _always_ get the advertised speed, and sometimes more.

I've not had any issues with them in 10 years, but it'd be nice to have a bit
of competition!

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chaz6
For me, when the service works, it works well, but there are 3 things that
really bug me about VM:-

1\. No IPv6 support. Still. In 2018.

2\. Upgrading is harder than it needs to be. They seem to show different
customers different things on the self service site so they make you call up.

3\. It is cheaper to get a bundle with a phone line than one without. Why?

------
cannonedhamster
This sounds like an immensely better experience than anything in the U.S.A.
that doesn't just work. I'm still jealous that you can just switch to another
ISP.

