The Virgin Media cancellation dance

With the little price hike, my Virgin Media bill will be £70 a month so I decided to downgrade and get rid of the services I don’t use.
Called up on Friday and got offered Medium TV, phone and 50mb broadband for £28.99 a month.
Rang back tonight and that deal wasn’t available so i’m now playing the cancellation game.

5 mins after I cancelled, there was a call offering me Friday’s deal. I declined. 5 minutes later I had a call from an automated customer survey.
I’ve just upped the stakes with some “disappointed” Twitter action.

How do we think this one will pan out?

I’m hoping that I won’t be cancelling the cancellation in a few days…

I pay £29.99 for just 20Mb/s with Virgin. Keep meaning to leave, complete rip off as I can barely get 4 Mb/s most of the time….

They pulled the Walking Dead on demand box sets just before Christmas, when I rang them to complain they gave me 6 months free Netflix… only to ring back to say they couldn’t do that either because I have V+ and not TiVo.

I’m paying too much with Virgin but any reduction in packages automatically kicks off another 12 month commitment so I’ve just bought a HD Freeview smart telly and am currently getting to grips with all the different ways to stream & share content before I’ll probably bin Virgin altogether.

We pay around £70pcm, upgraded our broadband (free) from 20Mb/s to 50Mb/s and it’s worse if anything. I did the complain thing last year and got new hardwear, better TV etc. I find they respond quite quickly to Tweets. If it carries on I’ll be ringing them to vent my spleen, it’s infuriating there’s no customer loyalty deals going.

From my own experience, if you go through with the cancellation you’ll be going back with your tail between your legs in the not-too-distant future.

Out of the VM, BT, Sky and talktalk contracts we’ve had, VM are head and shoulders above the others in terms of line speed, customer service, speed of rectifying faults and price.

From my own experience, if you go through with the cancellation you’ll be going back with your tail between your legs in the not-too-distant future.

I don’t plan on leaving. Can’t have Sky and I know BT can’t offer me the broadband service we need.
Just trying to get my bill down. I’ll settle for £25 and the superhub 2….

I was with virgin for six years, they rang me offering an upgrade service better bandwidth etc, I accepted but the new service was worse than the old and eventually stopped working altogether. They wouldn’t even investigate the problem (even though it coincided exactly with the upgrade) without me accepting the risk of a large BT bill should he problem turn out to be within my house.

Eventually I got fed up of the repeated 90 minute phone calls to poorly trained staff and went to BT which worked immediately at a greatly increased download speeds. Virgin sent me a bill for £200 for cancelling a contract which they considered “new” because of the recent upgrade(that didn’t work) despite me being with them six years.

Then followed 24 months of various debt collectors working on behalf of Virgin sending me threatening letters or even ringing, I told the ones who rang to stop mincing and take me to court , we both knew it would cost them a fortune and they would lose.
Like most British service providers (any industry) they are full of BS, parasites by nature and focus 100% on the sharpest tactics they can possibly get away with in the terms they apply.

Conversely Virgin have always been great with me, answered phones quickly, service has been great. I have their fibre BB at 50mb and its rock solid. Tivo has been great and when our box went kaput they came out and fixed it next day on a bank holiday.
I’ve redently negotiated a new 12 months contract which was cheaper and I get more. Win!

£29 for tv and 50 meg BB is a good deal

I pay £26.50 (and it’s going up in Feb) for just the BB.

And we have a winner…

Medium TV package, phone line with weekend calls, 50mb broadband and a new Superhub 2. 12 month contract with no price increase…..

£22.99 a month. 🙂

I’ll be phoning them soon too.
I just have the basic of everything, which makes the £3.99 price increase next month over 10% rise!

We had Virgin in our old house, and the service (both the actual product, and the customer service) was atrocious. Broadband dropped out if a squirrel in the vicinity farted, and the TV service decided it would be better for our wellbeing to prevent us from watching anything. Tivo decided it didn’t like letting us watch a program from start to finish, deciding instead to randomly stop, freeze, crash or simply refuse to play.

Ended up giving them an ultimatum that unless they came to pick up their useless black boxes I would be leaving them in the garden the following day.

Funnily enough they came to collect. Useless bunch of tossers. If I have a choice about it, I will never go back, even if it means giving money to the dirty digger.

No help to anyone really as Tesco Boradband are now Talktalk.
I had a great experience with Tesco Broadband. Through to a real UK call centre within a minute and had my contract cancelled within another minute at no cost.
They did offer me a fantastic deal if I stay but the house I’ve moved to already has internet included.

I’ve had terrible experiences with Sky, BT and Virgin. Impossible to deal with.

Good work! Reminds my of cancelling Orange mobile contract; ask to be out through to cancellations….”hello, retentions”
“errr, no I asked for cancellations”
“OK, what do you want?”
They met all my steep demands, every year!

Not for much longer. They are now “divesting”.

£22.99 a month

Bargain.

With or without line rental?

Called up to cancel, a bit of a bluff as we can’t get fiber optic BB from any other provider…

Got £16 off the inflated price, increased BB speed to 100Mb, and 6 months free Netflix.

Still 55 a month though (XL TV (eurosport) plus Tivo) 😡

torsoinalake – Member
£22.99 a month
Bargain.
With or without line rental?

All in.

Nice.

Phone call to Virgin Media coming up.

you all sound like you’re getting a good deal. I was/am on a friends and family deal with someone who i cant even remember his name with.. I get;

100meg
230 channels (XL TV)
Free UK landline phone calls

cost: £52.60

though, i’ve just seen £26 worth of extras 🙁 the missus has been calling someone i know it…

I used to get that exact same bundle Sui. No F&F deal though.

Ive just called they knocked a bit off but said ops deal was a no chance. New router on way but may have to do the old cancel call. Tho everyone elses internet seems poor in comparison tbh

I actually cancelled with them though and gave 30 day’s notice. They called me back. Retention people can offer a bit but wouldn’t offer what I’m on now.

Cancel with them and they’ve got 30 days to make you a better offer. I’ve had no loss of service in between.

Cheers will call next week after ive tested new router

Keep wondering if one could make do with a 4g only connection – don’t know much about it – wheather it’s feasible to run multiple devices – games consoles etc – sick of getting hit for phone and internet bills – they’re creeping up and up …

Looking at jumping ship from them too. They are just expensive :/

To be fair I’ve had no problems with them, and the internet speeds are great, however I’m paying about £80 a month for 60MB internet, M+ TV and Phone – I get sky sports too which is around £30 a month, but only use it for the F1 chan. I don’t use the phone either.

Talk talk can do the same (less internet speed) for way way cheaper….hmm hmm 🙂

My dad lives in a little German town where you can’t get wired internet.
He has to use 4G. It’s actually very good. We’re able to use Apple TV, Netflix at the same time as using the PC.

Talk Talk threatened us with a court summons, bailiffs letters, because our bill was overdue for the full sum of……. £0.00p. I kid you not. Try explaining to anyone at Talk Talk of what incompetence and stupidity is……. they don’t know what it is……
As for Virgin, I have just cut our package, which was the TV extra large, free landline calls at the weekend and 20 mb internet. We were paying £72 a month and wanted an extra £8 a month. They basically said, ‘tell us when you want to leave’, which was a lovely way of said pi$$ off……… Spoke to another person and have now a 100 mb internet,next week, Tivo and an extra V+ box, free weekend calls and TV large for £52 a month. Still expensive, but options are crap.

Looking at jumping ship from them too. They are just expensive :/

To be fair I’ve had no problems with them, and the internet speeds are great, however I’m paying about £80 a month for 60MB internet, M+ TV and Phone – I get sky sports too which is around £30 a month, but only use it for the F1 chan. I don’t use the phone either.

Talk talk can do the same (less internet speed) for way way cheaper….hmm hmm

Have you considered ditching the F1 channel (saving £360 a year) and buying the 10 races that aren’t on bbc through now TV (£70 / year) ?

Talk Talk threatened us with a court summons, bailiffs letters, because our bill was overdue for the full sum of……. £0.00p. I kid you not

Oh, we had that one as well…that was after taking 6 months to disconnect us…

I’ve just cancelled with them, hoping they call back…

Here’s a funny thing – letter from Virgin Monday saying they’re getting out of National Broadband and moving everyone to TalkTalk. No warning, no options. Yesterday the ‘smooth changeover’ resulted in 4.5 hours outage, engineer to the house twice and exchange once. Hasty, ill executed bodge.

stever – Member
Here’s a funny thing – letter from Virgin Monday saying they’re getting out of National Broadband and moving everyone to TalkTalk. No warning, no options. Yesterday the ‘smooth changeover’ resulted in 4.5 hours outage, engineer to the house twice and exchange once. Hasty, ill executed bodge.

They basically sold off all the poor, copper ADSL stuff to Talk Talk. Cabling that wasn’t able to handle the faster speeds.
Annoying for you and the other 100,000 people it may have affected but doesn’t affect new customers or those of us in well-connected areas.

Have you considered ditching the F1 channel (saving £360 a year) and buying the 10 races that aren’t on bbc through now TV (£70 / year) ?

I’d pay £360 just to avoid listening to Eddie Jordan

They basically sold off all the poor, copper ADSL stuff to Talk Talk.

Ha!
Didn’t sell the fibre customers as they know full well that they’d cancel all of the TV services 😀

£46.99 for XL T.V (which includes BT Sports), all HD channels, medium BB and weekend inclusive calls and includes LR.

The recent TiVo update has improved the interface imo too.

‘Like’

well it has been a few hrs and I’ve heard nothing…

They basically sold off all the poor, copper ADSL stuff to Talk Talk. Cabling that wasn’t able to handle the faster speeds.
Annoying for you and the other 100,000 people it may have affected but doesn’t affect new customers or those of us in well-connected areas.

The irony is they put fibre in my area last year, but Virgin aren’t offering it.