virgin misleads people

[nutty7]

I signed up for an 8 meg (upto being their legal get out) and its been total crap since i signed up 3 months ago. During peak times its down to less than 500k on average, somtimes dropping to 200k. Havn't been able to play any online games at all from 16.00 hrs till early morning. The customer service is just as good, 3 standard replies with no human actualy reading what the complaint is. I am cancelling my payments and if they wanna sue my they are welcome to try, cos ive got the evidence to prove that the product is not as described. MY ADVICE; dont touch virgin broadband with a very long barge pole. And if you have same problems as me just cancel your payments and see what happens, i'll bet its nothing.

[Paul K]

You would be suprised how "Nothing" comes in the form of a debt collection agency. What have CS/ TS said so far as to what the issue is?

[JohnHorb]

..plus if it's 'up to 8MB', it's presumably ADSL rather than cable, in which case distance from the exchange becomes a factor.

[Paul]

I signed up for an 8 meg (upto being their legal get out)upto isn't a legal getout - it's a technical fact of ADSL that the further away from the exchange you are, the less speed you will get.

[nutty7]

READ my post, "during peak times" ie its a contention ratio problem. at 10 in the morning its fine, cos nobody is using it. And before the debt collection agency comes they have to take me to court where i will happily turn up and prove that they are in breach of the sale of goods act by supplying a product that in no way relates to the description given

---------- Post added at 21:55 ---------- Previous post was at 21:48 ----------

paul... they have not even read my complaints they just send a standard mail telling me to pull my bt box apart and connect direct to the socket THREE times. Anad if the distance to the exchange was a factor why does my speed drop off at 16.30 every day and all weekend ? could they be moving the exchange, no, these are the times when more people are using the service.

---------- Post added at 21:57 ---------- Previous post was at 21:55 ----------

yes john it is adsl not cable, but i am posting as much as poss about the lying ***** at virgin wherever i can

[Tezcatlipoca]

You'd really be better off writing to them & saying you want to cancel it, & pointing out exactly why, rather than just going & cancelling the payments...debt collectors & bad credit ratings are not a good thing to suffer


By 500k & 200k do you mean your "up to" 8mbps connection drops to 500 & 200 KBps or kbps?

If kbps, then fair enough, that sucks. Big time. If kilobytes per second, though, then 500 KBps is around 4 mbps.... still not 8 mbps, but not too bad.

Also, distance isn't the only factor with ADSL.....noise is a big factor too...and it changes through the day...when the noise margin drops, the speed drops...

My Sky BB "up to" 16mbps service only actually tends to connect at 8-9mbps, 'cos of high attenuation (caused by line length) & low noise margin.

Have you tried removing the ring wire? Won't help with attenuation, but does help with noise. Also, replacing the BT master's faceplate with a filtered one can improve noise problems.

[nutty7]

Yeh matt i mean kbps, and it does suck. As for writing to them you cant as they have no address to write to, or phone number other than 0906 premium rate, well i aint paying them 50p p/min to complain, and an email is as good as a written letter by law, so they have had 3 months do explain and havn't bothered, good enough for any adjudicator in a civil court.

[sollp]

Must admit this has been exactly the same issue i have with the ADSL service. Changed from F2S 3 weeks ago to Virginbroadband,(ADSL).Had 8Mb on F2S as soon as i swapped noticed the same problem straight away. I only changed due to me having the colleague offer. I'm switching back to F2S 12/3/07. Have done various route traces using the visual route programme and have found all default gateways the same, as soon as it hits the first hop, bang, 200ms on the ping. This is the same for the BAM's(Broadband Access modules) at Winnersh, guildford, Brentford ect the only one that seems to give me some benefit is Birmingham. I just reboot the modem till i get the Birmingham as my first hop.

The network is being upgraded as we speak as they are aware of it, but i'm not prepared to wait for it. Vote with your feet, simple really>

[dcclanuk]

READ my post, "during peak times" ie its a contention ratio problem. at 10 in the morning its fine, cos nobody is using it. And before the debt collection agency comes they have to take me to court where i will happily turn up and prove that they are in breach of the sale of goods act by supplying a product that in no way relates to the description given

---------- Post added at 21:55 ---------- Previous post was at 21:48 ----------

paul... they have not even read my complaints they just send a standard mail telling me to pull my bt box apart and connect direct to the socket THREE times. Anad if the distance to the exchange was a factor why does my speed drop off at 16.30 every day and all weekend ? could they be moving the exchange, no, these are the times when more people are using the service.

---------- Post added at 21:57 ---------- Previous post was at 21:55 ----------

yes john it is adsl not cable, but i am posting as much as poss about the lying ***** at virgin wherever i can

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA:D

[Paul]

paul... they have not even read my complaints they just send a standard mail telling me to pull my bt box apart and connect direct to the socket THREE times. Anad if the distance to the exchange was a factor why does my speed drop off at 16.30 every day and all weekend ? could they be moving the exchange, no, these are the times when more people are using the service.
To quote yourself - "READ my post ..." :)

I never said anything about what your problem may [or may not] be, I simply pointed out the error in your previous statement - 'upto' is not a legal getout, it's a fact of ADSL that your maximum speed will depend on distance to the exchange, therefore it can be upto 8M (or 16, or whatever). :cool:

Your actual problem looks much like congestion, but only an engineer could tell for certain what the fault is.

[sr55]

Can i just point out that
500Kbit is acceptable for an 8mbit service. (although maybe not from a user point of view :/)

BT define the range as 400Kbit ~ 8Mbit as working within parameters and so something like this will not be rasied as a fault or capacity issue.

afaik Virgin, the old virgin.net isp which is what your on, has BT central capacity problems so thats prob the cause. They were supposed to be getting another central in place but i dunno what happened to that.

Still, could be worse. 2 years ago 500kbit was the avg anyway.

Do yourself a big favour, migrate away instead of getting into a fight. its only hassle for yourself.

[Peed_off_Dave]

afaik Virgin, the old virgin.net isp which is what your on, has BT central capacity problems so thats prob the cause. They were supposed to be getting another central in place but i dunno what happened to that.

So if there is a capacity problem then why are Virgin still selling a duff service; why don't they put a temp halt to broadband sign-ups until this capacity problem is sorted out instead of ******ing everyone off; they should also refund users for loss of service and also the loss of bandwidth that they should be getting!

A major car company wouldn't sell their latest model with duff engines and be allowed to get away with it, they would either do a recall or give you a refund!!

[AndyCambs]

To be fair, the title shouldn't be "Virgin misleads people", it should be "ADSL adverts in general are misleading", since it is applicable to Sky, BT, TalkTalk and all the other ADSL suppliers.

[sollp]

To be fair, the title shouldn't be "Virgin misleads people", it should be "ADSL adverts in general are misleading", since it is applicable to Sky, BT, TalkTalk and all the other ADSL suppliers.

Yes got to agree with that, personally i was on F2S before i changed to Virgin.net and the performance was always good, hence the reason i'm going back to them even though it's going to cost me more than on Virgin.net.

[AndyCambs]

Yes got to agree with that, personally i was on F2S before i changed to Virgin.net and the performance was always good, hence the reason i'm going back to them even though it's going to cost me more than on Virgin.net.

And having said that - although Virgin ADSL suffers with the rest of them with the anticipated speeds - at least the BBC website reported last month that the Virgin.net customer satisfaction was higher than others.

Plus there's also the news about Virgin television packages expanding to non-cabled areas, which might assist

[lordy]

I agree that OP would be unwise to stop payments.
They really need to undestand precisely what the can expect from their connection to the exchange.
Based on that they can decide whether Virgin is underperforming. (Possibly posting Router stats in relevant forums on thinkbroadband and dslzone may help).

If virgin are underperforming on this line the the contract Section D.4 says,
Virgin will

"provide sufficient access servers to ensure a high standard of connectivity to the Service;"

It's ambiguous I know but OP could possibly write to Virgin, citing that, along with other information gathered from router stats, diary etc, in order to opt out of the contract legally, rather than having no legal leg to stand on.