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I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

virginmedia-is-evil.com

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Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#71

Post by syshum »

willcipriano wrote: post #42
artistsvoid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they can't charge you but will still try to 'collect' and ruin your credit rating I suppose? Well, doesn't solve a lot then.

Yes, with a service like internet you are paying for the previous months service, not the next month so the money is owed even if you cancel the credit card. Netflix bills you for the month upfront, so when you don't pay them simply remove access to the service and you owe nothing.

I wish my ISP they would give me the option to prepay... I would

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#72

Post by sakisv »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #18

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.

One more alternative for people in the UK: https://www.zen.co.uk/

Also not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.

Coincidentally, I switched to them once I managed to break free from Virgin. The major selling point for me: Lifetime price guarantee. After being with Virgin for 3 years and tolerating 2 price bumps, that was a breath of a fresh air.

Yes, the speeds are nowhere near what Virgin is offering, but for me, all the speed in the world cannot make up for obnoxious customer service, the terrible security and the shady practices they use to keep you handcuffed to them.

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#73

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Silhouette wrote: post #33
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #18

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.

AA have a good reputation. Zen do too. I'm not sure why anyone who'd done market research would go with one of the bigger name ISPs these days. Well, OK, I am sure: AA and Zen both tend to be a bit more expensive. But this is one of those areas where you get what you pay for, I guess. Ironically, the one major exception to this is Virgin, because they do offer an alternative product with technical advantages, whereas…

We had a Zen account for a while. They were terrible - absolutely hilariously incompetent at getting us connected, expensive, and minimal bandwidth at busy periods.

I'd used Zen about ten years earlier and they'd been much better, so I was very disappointed.

My experience with Virgin was fine. The product was fast, there were a couple of short outages but no serious technical issues, and I had no problem cancelling when I moved a few years ago.

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#74

Post by bnastic »

It's not that easy to get a contract either...

First they said "health and safety", they can't get a man to bring the cable up to 2nd floor. I said fine, how about I buy that cable, I drill my own walls, and bring you the cable down to the ground, can you connect that? "Sure, let's set up a date for engineer visit". All is ready, engineer comes carrying a modem... wtf... you are supposed to connect this to your box outside the property. He goes back, they cancel my request for service outright. I call them, and an utterly rude person tells me that the cancellation is final, there is no one to complain to, I can't talk to his manager, goodbye.

The UK broadband is in such an appalling state, that if you want better than ADSL you have to subject yourself to humiliation by Virgin Media who hold near monopoly over fast (for UK, anyway) lines as BT/Openreach are utterly disinterested in being part of the 21st century.

The day this ridiculous duopoly is broken up will be the day to rejoice! But I'm not holding my breath, this is a 3rd world country is so many ways that matter. (Actually, that's an insult to "3rd world" - there I got an actual 100/100Mbit ethernet connection installed in a matter of days for half the money Virgin is asking for their slowest service).

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#75

Post by yardstick »

Havoc wrote: post #36

Looking for fiber in London next month. I guess VM won't be it. Reddit seems to think Hyperoptic is where it's at. With VM as second. That's on raw speed front. So if VM can't be trusted I guess I need to apartment hunt by Hyper...sigh.

I’ll second Hyperoptic. Used them for 4 years now, really happy with the connection. They used to provide free public IPv4, but now it’s £5/month for a static.

In that time they have had a couple outages of a few hours, nothing unusual compared to other ISPs. Their 100 and 500Mbit plans are nicely priced. I went for 1Gbit even though I barely break 300-400 over Wifi, just in case. Plus my previous Internet was an atrocious 6Mbit ADSL1 line which I was completely fed up with, so instinctively just wanted the most bandwidth I could get!

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#76

Post by wrkronmiller »

willcipriano wrote: post #42
artistsvoid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they can't charge you but will still try to 'collect' and ruin your credit rating I suppose? Well, doesn't solve a lot then.

Yes, with a service like internet you are paying for the previous months service, not the next month so the money is owed even if you cancel the credit card. Netflix bills you for the month upfront, so when you don't pay them simply remove access to the service and you owe nothing.

That’s a really interesting point. Can you think of a good reason for services like internet to be post-paid? I cannot.

Perhaps the reason they are is specifically to enable these distasteful collections practices?

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#77

Post by lightgreen »

harel wrote: post #60
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #18

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.

Thanks, I wasn't aware aa existed. What kind of speed are you getting out of it on average?

AFAIU from reading their website they sell the same Openreach ADSL as the rest of providers (except Virgin or Hyperoptic which have own fibre).

So the speed is the same as any ADSL provider: 70 down, 15 up or so.

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#78

Post by mhandley »

harel wrote: post #60
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #18

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.

Thanks, I wasn't aware aa existed. What kind of speed are you getting out of it on average?

I'm on FTTC 80/20. Their control pages (which are excellent BTW) tell me the VDSL sync speed is currently 72.7Mb/s. They allow you to set an FQ/shaper upstream of the DSL infrastructure. I have the shaper set to 95% of the sync speed. This means I'm trading off 5% of the capacity, but in return I never see any queuing delays in the BT infrastructure. For example, I just ran a ping from my home to my lab across London. With an idle link, I get 10ms RTT. Then I ran a DSL speed test and saturated the downlink. It reports 65 Mbps which is pretty much what I get 24/7. But the real story is that the ping briefly only increased to 30ms just when the speed test started, then dropped back to 11ms for the duration of the speed test. That's really good isolation. Bandwidth is really not a big deal anymore - what matters is latency, but most ISPs just don't get this. Often you need to buy stupid link speeds just to avoid queuing delays. But I find that FTTC is fine for everyone in my family to run simultaneous Netflix sessions and me to videoconference at the same time with no noticable additional latency on my call.

Edit: here's the graphs from the A&A control page for my line for the last week. These are really helpful figuring out what's going on if anything is strange. You can see that the mean RTT doesn't really move off the bottom axis, and the peak RTT pretty much never exceeds 50ms. http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/latency.png

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#79

Post by dijksterhuis »

mhandley wrote: post #78
harel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I wasn't aware aa existed. What kind of speed are you getting out of it on average?

I'm on FTTC 80/20. Their control pages (which are excellent BTW) tell me the VDSL sync speed is currently 72.7Mb/s. They allow you to set an FQ/shaper upstream of the DSL infrastructure. I have the shaper set to 95% of the sync speed. This means I'm trading off 5% of the capacity, but in return I never see any queuing delays in the BT infrastructure. For example, I just ran a ping from my home to my lab across London…

> Their control pages (which are excellent BTW)

Can confirm. They are awesome! You can see network logins/logouts for the last 12 hours.

I love the email I get whenever my connection has dropped, and the next email 30 seconds later after reconnection.

Absolute genius.

EDIT: Check out their network status page: https://aastatus.net/

Re: I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract

#80

Post by teh_klev »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #18

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.

I'm with A&A as well and since the mid 2000's. Despite being on Universal Credit due to my freelance biz going down the toilet due to Coronavirus, I'll do my absolute best to stay with them even if it means living off of cheap frozen peas and 50p supernoodles. They're not cheap but they bloody well answer the phone within 30 seconds and their tech support know their stuff. Even in my present crappy financial situation the thought of settling for anything else cheaper from Sky, BT, TalkTalk et al makes me shudder.
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