Virgin outages/customer service

wisteria53 · October 2011

We got a card through the door for last Friday. However, that doesn't cover the fact that the broadband has been stop-start for about two weeks....

miss annie · October 2011

I'm in South West SG and we have streetlights and BT Infinty

wisteria53 · October 2011

thread should really be named Virgin Outrages

gardener-joe · October 2011

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[Deleted User] · October 2011

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Ali · October 2011

I saw two Virgin Engineers fiddling about in a box on Woodstock Rd between Perth and Oxford Road on the school pick up yesterday.

rainbow_carnage · October 2011

@Ali - They were here last week, too. We're on the phone to Virgin every weekend. They promise to credit £5 to our account, but never do. Not that a fiver is enough compensation for repeated outages. I'd happily pay more for a fast, reliable connection, but I've yet to find an ISP that's any better than Virgin.

Ali · October 2011

The problem is that they are the only fast one as they have a bit of fibre optic and coax to the house. I have always found BT realiable with little or no downtime I get about 8 to 9Mb. Might move to Infinity once it gets here

Ali · October 2011

Meant to also say that Virgin seem to operate in a bit of a monopolistic manner, with fairly high pricing for what seems to be not great service. They should be made to open up their network (and ducting) like BT has to so other providers use their network as that would force up quality and push down prices. They seem to behave a bit like BT used many moons ago

odd stewart · October 2011

They have been terrible for me, on Ferme Park Road. Many outages, bad communication about engineer visits (literally cancelling then turning up anyway and giving me conflicting info) and the landline calls seem expensive. We have a 20mb + phone + TV (just the basic channels) and the bill is £50-60 a month. Can anyone recommend a really good, fast, top value service for this area?

Arkady · October 2011

Talk Talk are ace. Fast, completely relaible, cost me about £16 a month for phone+broadband. Can't help you with TV though.

odd stewart · October 2011

Talk Talk... I thought they were famously crap along with orange! I will check them out. Thanks.

Ali · October 2011

get yourself a Freeview PVR and I belive that TalkTakl will be offering Yourview sometime next yeay. It is Freeview with on line demand replay TV and Films etc a bit like BT Vision but with mulipul supliers on the same platform. Bt will be offering this as well

rainbow_carnage · October 2011

We had TalkTalk for a couple of years. Virgin's actually a big improvement. TalkTalk regularly limited our connection to 0.5mb, though we were paying for 10mb. I was on the phone to them every week. They'd boost it for a while, then it would drop again. When we left them, they never refunded the £20 that they owed us. Bastards. Virgin is crap. TalkTalk is genuinely awful.

poxy · October 2011

I've not had a single outage on Virgin for months. Are you all sure you've been paying you bills on time?

harpistic · October 2011

TalkTalk seems to either be great or completely dire. I used it for the month I lived in Crouch End (before moving to SGR), they really do love throttling speeds at peak times, not good if you want to... pretty much do anything which requires a reliable internet connection.

I'm thinking it might be worth trying Virgin in conjunction with OpenDNS (www.opendns.com) - usually when an ISP fails, it's because of DNS problems so using OpenDNS can avoid being affected by this. God knows, much as I'm fond of O2, their service barely worked at weekends without using OpenDNS servers.....

odd stewart · October 2011

@poxy yeah I pay my bills and they aren't cheap. I think they sting us on the landline calls which don't come in cheap at all. Having poor mobile reception means I need it tho...

There are definitely 'bigger' problems in the N4 area, our part of it anyway. I see the virgin engineer dudes peering in to street boxes quite a lot at the moment.

I might have a look at what BT can offer, but you never know whether things will be better or worse.

harpistic · October 2011

@domnextmen Worse. No question about it!

Sunshine Trio · October 2011

Hello!
We're finally back online after two weeks with no internet! An engineer came this morning and said there was no signal coming from our box. He then went outside to the street fixed something and voila we were back up and running!
Such a quick fix we hadn't even managed to boil the kettle to make him a brew!
Anyone else back up and running after this?!

Ian · October 2011

We had another engineer yesterday. He changed where we were on the junction box and dialled up the signal strength to our house so we will see what happens. I told Virgin there were a few people with problems round here - they did a search and couldn't find anyone complaining so I pointed them to this thread.

Ali · November 2011

Seems like the BT Infinity offer can’t be too far away. I noticed on their big green connection boxes has been built on the pavement outside the post office on SGR.

Fin · November 2011

Tip for anyone having problems with Virgin. Having ignored at least half a dozen requests to speak to somone about my greivances, a representative finally called me back once they'd received notice I was about to move my phone service. Funny that. Upshot is I am still moving my phone and broadband (to BT which will save me £15 a month for what should be a more reliable, faster service), have finally registered my complaint and am negotiating a discount on my TV service.

harpistic · November 2011

Another tip for long-suffering Virgin customers: if your broadband is down (no flickering lights on the box), it's possible that it may have decided to restore itself to its factory settings. If you think this may be happening to you, check the back of the box for the ID, then check if that's in the list of available networks. If so, your admin page will have reset itself too, but the password is on the back of the box. Update the settings, and your wireless is back!

(This just happened to me. Grr).

julieshrive · November 2011

Since the Geek squad could access my system from afar now getting paranoid.It doesn't warrant thinking about.They often update as doing with new Tivo box [ that can't be read on a portable] &at weekends suspect play God?They have you by the.... if you don't want to change number or email address. But they all have Call centres copying each other so problem is the same . How about Watchdog or which conversation ?

hooofck · November 2011

Don't mean to reopen any old wounds, but anyone else been experiencing reduced broadband speeds over the last 24 hours? I'm paying through the nose for the 50mB service but only getting about 3, sometimes less than 1 (normally get about 35). Really wanted to watch the Dennis Wilson profile on iPlayer but left with The Kooks etc on hold to Virgin's customer 'care'. Boooooooo!

unattachedinfant · November 2011

Yep, can barely even stream a 30 second YouTube video! Only getting about 6Mb through laptop and even less on phone. Very annoying.

Margolada · November 2011

Do you know what can be the problem if i can get internet only if i connect the cable to wireless box? if i go wireless i hardly have any internet. Thought its worht asking the question before trying to call their call centre somewhere in India.

andy · November 2011

Can you reset the channel that the wifi broadcasts? My understanding is that in areas with lots of competing wifi networks, there's interference, so it's easier to broadcast on something other than the standard broadcast channel.

harpistic · November 2011

It may also be worth trying out OpenDNS's DNS servers (http://www.opendns.com/) - they've helped in the past with erratic service. Their DNS servers are 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220

Margolada · December 2011

@andy - do you reset the wifi box of is it something on the computer? i have a mac and it is still a bit of unknown territory.

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