I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

Abuses such as this infuriate me, and I typically have a very low tolerance for them now.

Any business that is causing trouble at my expense still gets one polite attempt to contact them via their preferred means and a reasonable chance to respond, but usually only one. I'm not hanging around on the phone for more than a few minutes or waiting more than a couple of working days for a substantial response to an online message.

My next contact is normally now a recorded delivery letter sent to their registered address, which here in England is something any business with the typical legal structure must have as a matter of public record and where mail sent to it must be read. I set out my grievance, what I want them to do about it, and often at this point some compensation I want for the problem and/or subsequent trouble getting it dealt with, in a form that can become the start of a formal legal action if necessary.

This strategy has generally been enough to get whatever the problem was resolved reasonably quickly and without any further messing around. I suspect this is because anything that turns up in that form and is potentially relevant to a real legal action automatically gets passed to the business's legal team to deal with. The legal team presumably then has both the awareness to recognise a legitimate grievance and the authority to do something about it rather than let it escalate.

I don't like that this seems to have become necessary to get a reasonable response from a lot of large businesses today, but fortunately for all of us in my country, there isn't actually any obligation to play by the business's rules in a dispute if they're giving us the run-around.

I once downgraded my Virgin package, the online support was helpful and let me know which department to ask for and exactly what to request. Once on the phone I think I was forwarded on about 3 times before I got the right person. From that point on it was really painless. I think it took about 20 minutes in total? All I wanted to do was drop down to the lowest speed package and stop paying for the landline phone service I was never going to use.

I now have the opposite problem, I'd like to upgrade my package and get a higher uplink speed, but the website just throws a generic error if I try to view upgrades available to my account. I'm not bothered enough to pick up the phone yet.

And this is why consumers like Apple’s iOS subscriptions.

In the UK, use this: https://www.aa.net.uk/

I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They just have a great reputation for good technical knowledge, privacy, and support.

We've tried to downgrade our Virgin Broadband but never managed to succeed no matter how many times we tried to call. They ask for some passwords, which they are suppose to send by mail but never send it; they ask to verify our identity but always find some reason why they couldn't verify (despite having full access to our account). Every time it's 15-20 min wait in the phone, every time different new BS from a different operator, it's quite infuriating.

Eventually, our contract expired and got auto-renewed to a more expensive one (because the one we were on didn't exist anymore). So every month we're paying for something we don't need, like TV etc, and we don't have a choice because there's only Virgin where we are.