This is mainly for those of you who are based in the UK.
Virgin Media, the So called Media Powerhouse is no such thing, and i will be detailing the reasons why below.
So Virgin Media like to boast that they have the fastest broadband widely available in the UK at the moment. Now i for one, have worked for Virgin media, in their Retentions team, and i have had to deal with most of the issues that Virgin Media has with their services.
Now Virgin Media state that they have speeds of up to 200MB that they are able to provide to those of us who are willing to pay for such speeds. However about 50% of the reasons why people ask to leave Virgin when i was there was because the speed was not what was advertised or they were without the Broadband for a certain period of time.
Now let me put this into some context for you, Virgin would sell 200MB Broadband on it's own fort roughly £40 per month, maybe a little less depending on other services and any deals that they would have at the time. about 25% of the time, the service was down. About 30% of the time the service wasn't as fast as what was expected, being somewhere between 80MB and 150MB.
One of the first days that i was in Virgin Media i had to go through the standard training, and part of it was an explanation of Virgin Media Services. Now part of that speech was that they advised that they were able to provide speeds of up to 1000MB's or basically 1 GB connections, they just haven't done this apparently because they are still faster than the current providers. Now the fact that they stated this yet unable to provide the speeds that they were offering at the time is basically a contradiction in itself.
You see the way i saw it, you can think of broadband like a river. Every time someone in in a certain area used their broadband, they used a certain proportion of the stream that was available. Now if we consider 10 houses all with 100MB Broadband being unable to use the full speed at the same time, then how are Virgin going to be able to cope with 10 houses supposedly using 1GB connections? this simply does not make sense, if they are able to provide these speeds at a flick of a switch, then why are they having trouble just supplying the 100MB Connections.
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Now my 2nd point here, would be the TV. They try to make out that they have the same sort of channels that Sky does, maybe a few less, or a few different channels. However the reality is that they services still don't work 100% and they have no where near the same channels as Sky. Now some of this is expected, since Sky 1, Sky Atlantic and other Sky channels are the sole property of Sky, and they are not going to allow someone else to use them when this is their main selling point.
However they don't help themselves, they are more concerned with making money, than they are with actually providing a quality service to other people. This was evident by the way that they paid their staff, by the limitations put on us when it comes to saving customers, and just due to the issues that i have had to argue against on a daily basis, to persuade customers to stay when they don't want to.
Now don't get me wrong, some just purely want a lower price, but others have genuine concerns and issues that Virgin Media just simply cannot rectify. This along with diminishing Call Centres in the UK, and Indian Staff that have no fucking clue what they are doing, means that unfortunately Virgin is going down hill. They are distancing themselves more and more from the people that they are supposedly serving, or providing services for.
Bottom Line, Virgin Media, are full of Shit. Don't get me wrong they aren't all bad, and i'm sure that there is someone out there who would be able to advise of similar issues or other issues with other providers. However my recommendation would be to stay away from Virgin Media as much as you can.
Let me know what you think below, if you've had any issues, or even if you've had a good experience with Virgin Media let me know. It would be interesting to see what people think, or what they actually know about Virgin.