Review
Where to begin? (Clue - dont even think about signing up. Move on, find a different provider). The below letter, should give you an idea of our nightmare. (Despite my complaint being logged they threatened us with court action if we didnt pay the withheld £167 cancelation fee. Not wanting a bad credit reference we gave in to their bullying tactics to be free of them and peace of mind. Deplorable treatment of "customers".
Account no: 740228901
Regarding the above account number at the address of xxxxxx Road, EN5 xxx.
From your letter dated 12 Feb I see that we have been charged £167.92 cancelation fee.
Let me explain why we will not be paying this.
The service provided by Virgin Media has been not fit for purpose. We both work from home. Both of us found that our laptops kept disconnecting from the wifi, our Teams and Zoom calls kept dropping. This was embarrassing and unacceptable, not to mention we both lost work we had spent a lot of time on.
We called many times, to lodge complaints and try and get Virgin to do something about it. However, after listening to answering machine messages and dreadful muzak for hours we were usually cut off, or, if someone did answer, then they said they would put us through to someone else, and then we were cut off! As you can imagine, having an internet service that keeps cutting you off is one thing, but when the service provider keeps cutting you off as well, when you try and speak to them, well, that’s the final straw.
So over many months we probably spent a small fortune on phone calls, and got through only once I believe to lodge a complaint. We had an engineer round who did nothing else than apologise but the service did not improve, although once I did manage to remain on a video call for almost 25 minutes before I was disconnected.
Very frustrating, when the service you pay for doesn’t work and the service provider is not available to listen to your issues. So nothing changed. In the end, both myself and my wife, bought, at our own expense, data packages for both our mobile phones, and used these to connect our laptops to in order to be able to work from home.
So as you can see, the service provided by Virgin, such that it was, was not fit for the purpose that we intended it for. Secondly, we had little ability to make contact with the service provider to raise the issue. When we did manage to get through, nothing was done. We have had to pay a second service provider to provide the service that we were already paying Virgin to provide.
I believe we were in fact miss-sold this broadband service by Virgin as the quality was clearly not good enough for daily use and its intended purpose.
Therefore, we will not be paying your cancellation fee, and are considering notifying trading standards to recover further costs we have paid to Virgin for a service that we were miss-sold, that was not usable as intended and that Virgin did nothing to remedy. We are now with BT and have no issues at all. Moreover, when we call them, someone actually answers the phone.
Regards,
Lukas Tatek.