Zen seem to get great reviews but works out that for the same money you can get 30 mbps with virgin fibre optic. Is it because of customer service or are zeb just better overall because don’t slow things down? Just wondering if virgin is actually overestimating what you reliably get and better to go with zen? Probably get tv with virgin regardless. I await the hive mind consensus, thanks.

VM 100mb here. Ok for downloading, but still slows up sometimes.

IMAG1275 by pten2106, on Flickr

Possibly depends where you are? Virgin’s capacity to deal with peak loads in term time here in Portsmouth and Southsea is woeful and the speed drops considerably on rainy evenings when seemingly, the students and everyone else stay indoors 😕

South west london. Yeah I had virgin before and seemed to slow on sundays and peak times, wonder if faster virgin will still match slower zen?

Generally, with the new super hubs, if Virgin say you’ll get 30Mb, you’ll get bang on 30Mb.

However, where virgin fail, is their customer service. It is, in my experience, absolutely abysmal. They really couldn’t make it worse if they tried. They’d win the competition ‘Worst customer service on purpose’, absolutely hands down. I even reckon, and I accept I’m pushing the limits of acceptance here, but I even reckon they’d beat British Gas in that competition.

We’ve had intermittant connection issues with our broadband for months. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve phoned them up. I’ve raised formal complaints, we’ve had lots of engineers round, I must have spoken to every department in Virgin about this. It can’t be that hard to put a tag on an account to say ‘This bloke is having lots of issues, treat him differently but I can absolutely guarantee if I phoned up right now to say my broadband isn’t working, the perso on the end of the phone would say ‘can you reboot your router’. IT’S NOT THE FRICKING ROUTER!!! I know this because it’s been replaced twice. As has all the cabling. READ THE BLOODY HISTORY BEFORE YOU START TRYING TO GET ME TO FOLLOW A SCRIPT!!!

So far, amongst many others, we’ve heard the following gems on what the problem is

“the server is full”
“The box at the end of the street gets too hot”
“You’re too close to the box at the end of the street”
“Your connection is too good”

And the problem still remains. After about 3 months of complaints. I’d leave but we’re miles from the exchange and the best we can get over copper is about 1Mb.

USELESS!!

HTH.

edit: Here’s something else they do as well. the engineer will turn up and say ‘it’s a network issue’. As far as he’s concerned the call is closed AND VIRGIN WILL THEN CLOSE THE ISSUE ON OUR ACCOUNT. Next time we phone up with a problem, they’ll deny all knowledge that there was any problem and there is no link between the account problem, and this ‘network issue’ so you’re right back to square one.

That’s exactly what Sky do.

You battle to speak to CST or whatever they call it this week, the actual techies rather than the script monkeys. The make some ephemeral change and tell you to try it for a couple of days and call back, then when you do call back they’ve closed the call so you’ve got to start again. Doesn’t matter that your case has been escalated to the moon and back, you’ve got to spend yet another ten minutes with some penis asking you what colour your ethernet cable is. Every. Time. You. Ring.

I phoned up on Saturday when it failed again (and bearing in mind we’re moving this Saturday coming, I’m really only doing it to make sure they keep registering the continued poor service against the account).

The gentlemen on the phone brightly tells me we’ve been disconnected because we’re being moved across on Friday and is there anything else he can help me with. I explain that since we’re not moving across till Friday, he’d better get us reconnected sharpish. Not my department he tells me. Why would I give a flying toss what department did it? Virgin have cut me off, Virgin need to reconnect me. GET IT DONE!

Few minutes on hold. Oh, he’s apologising now. Sorry sir, you’ve not been disconnected after all, terribly sorry for the mistake. We’ll get an engineer round on Monday to look at your fault. This one is a senior, senior engineer who, and I kid you not, “Is extra senior because he only looks after 100Mb links”. So that’ll be five multiplexed 20Mb channels then will it? I cut short my own query into how Virgin engineers are graded because it’s clearly going straight over his head.

Half an hour later, it’s working again.

Tactically, I’d nuke virgin from space in an attempt to resolve this issue.

For the reasons above is why I’m staying with zen.

In contrast to the above experiences Zen customer and technical support have never been anything other than exemplary in my experience. The technical people actually seem to know what they’re talking about – rather than just being script-readers – and if you know what you’re doing, or have already done some basic diagnostics, then they’ll listen to you and respond accordingly. Equally, if you haven’t got the faintest idea of what to do or how then they can deal with that as well.

If the speed difference is massive then it probably doesn’t make sense, but for a simple factor of 2x I think I’d be tempted to stick with Zen.

I had nothing but positive experiences with Zen also. But for what I was paying, I could get a faster, truly unlimited connection with Sky plus Sky TV for very little extra money, so I jumped ship. The actual connection from Sky has largely been great, but their tech support is woeful.

i’ve been with both – was a loyal Zen customer for years but they turned out to be just too expensive compared to what i could get with Virgin for the same money.

As long as Virgin works ok then you’ll be laughing – any problems and you’ll be asking why you bothered. But (touch wood) i’ve not had any problems with Virgin.

But if you’re getting the tv with Virgin anyhow then it makes sense £ wise to get their bb too.

Echo the comments about Virgin being great when it’s working (20mbps service, get 30mbps most of the time!!) but their C/S is woeful. Had drop-out problems a while back and took ages to get an engineer to come round. Turned out the junction box on the side of the flats was being kicked by students, causing the main feed to disconnect. Plug it back in and all’s well. He put a metal cover on it but that got nicked so most Sundays involve reconnecting it on my way back from getting the milk! Pity I had to spend over an hour going through the ‘Switch off and back on, reconnect the cable’ routine. Started playing games as in telling them it was reconnected when it wasn’t (in my hand while in the garden) only for them to say ‘Yes, we can see it’s connected now’ 🙄

We found that if you ring VM and get through to the call centre in India then just hang up and keep trying until a Newcastle accent comes on the line. Every problem fixed by UK techs in mins, foreign systems were always down, or the techs were useless and only worked off scripts.
We had 40MB and it was always 40MB, even at high load times.
If I could get it here I would. It’s so hard using 8MB max after being spoilt.

Cheers guys been moving today so just picking this up now. Zen will charge me for installation and router as well as higher bb cost so virgin make more sense financially. Wish I could afford zen just got to hope my virgin connection is ok…