NTL hell is now Virgin Media Hell. I have had a fault on my broadband for over a week now. It’s Christmas and I am not using my broadband much so I have not been overly bothered about it. I made the stupid assumption that Virgin Media would be hot on the heels of any faults.
How wrong was I!
I checked on their website to see if there is a local fault and according to Virgin Media there is no faults in my area. I decided to report a fault….
Virgin Media, in their wisdom have introduced a charge to call their technical support line. Basically to report a fault I need to pay them 25p per minute. Yes, you heard that correctly! I spoke to a different helpline on the local rate and was told that I would be refunded if it was a genuine fault so this leaves me in a bit of a dilemma.
You see, I remember spending in excess of 40 minutes on the old NTL technical support lines and eventually hanging up. So is Virgin Media different Do I risk spending £10 waiting for them to answer my call? I wonder if they have seen a drop in fault reports since introducing the charge.
I decided to call and see how long it takes to get through because with no Internet connection I cannot work. So the story goes like this.
I called them at 12:39:10
and I let it ring until 12:41 (I was surprised I didn’t get music)
Got someone at 12:41:20
and left the phone at 12:50
so the call came to over £2 but I was told I would get a refund. I was also told that there is no problem with the cable modem and that if an engineer comes out they will run the exact same tests and if there is no fault they will bill me £25. I decided against calling out an engineer.
Now. I have checked all my gear, it works fine. I have connected to two different servers in two different countries to make sure it is not the ISP the server resides with. Same problem, intermittent connection. So the lowest common denominator is Virgin Media. Unfortunately Virgin Media technical support are unable to diagnose faults unless it’s the cable modem. So this leave me with a severe problem.
The Internet is where I make my living. if I can’t work the mortgage won’t get paid. So! Do I stay with Virgin Media or do I go with BT?
I am sure BT has it’s own problems but they might be able to diagnose faults and therefore fix problems better than Virgin Media.
Has anyone else switched from Virgin Media to BT?