Virgin on the Ridiculous - Part One

Technology; it has the capacity to enrich our lives, but on occasions it is a source of incredible frustration. Watch TV for any length of time and you’ll see the adverts for various products, like smartphones with the disclaimer “Sequences shortened.” When you see that you just know that if you owned the product in question the sequences, i.e. the time you take to navigate between pages and applications will be a hell of a lot longer than they show on screen. Then there are the internet TV products, like You View. This type of thing is probably the future of TV viewing; while you’ll get your basic Freeview channels (if you’re not a cable or satellite subscriber, and we’ll come to that in a while) through your normal aerial, the extras, the bits you really want, will eventually be mainly available through the internet. But, and here’s the rub, You View and the like recommend that your minimum download speed be three meg or greater to use their services. Basically, under three or three and a half meg and you’ll suffer a lot of buffering if you get anything at all. So what a lot of you will be saying; these days three meg is the exception not the rule, most people are getting download speeds a lot greater than that. Well not me for one, I just ran a test through uswitch.com and my download speed is 1.3Mb and my upload speed is an even paltrier 0.4Mb and there’s not much prospect of these speeds increasing in the near future.

When the internet was all dial up and we were all getting download speeds of no more than 56Kps, web designers tailored website design accordingly with simple, easy to load pages and let’s face it, no one was downloading very much at those speeds. Then broadband came along and web designers exploited increased speeds to add all number of fancy graphics. Downloading music and movies became the norm and woe betide anyone left with just dial up access, so we all upgraded to broadband. While dial up speeds were pretty similar across the board and we all lived in a 56Kps ghetto, broadband speeds are much more varied. Like I say, my limit is 1.3Mb but a lot of Internet Service Providers (ISP) advertise speeds of up to 60Mb; Virgin are one such ISP.

Now Virgin is a company who I admire (in some ways). In my view they pretty much revolutionised mobile phone usage, they have done a lot of good stuff in the holiday arena, in flights and of course the music business, which was where the company started, so why does Virgin Media frustrate me to the point where I want to tear out what little of my hair that remains? I’ll tell you why. Many years ago a rep from Virgin Media approached me and asked if I’d be interested in subscribing to their TV and internet package. Yes, I said; I gave him my post code and when he’d checked he said that unfortunately my address wasn’t serviceable. This was no big deal; it was as I say, many years ago (pre-Freeview TV in fact) and I was quite happy with what I had in terms of the internet as in those days my use was confined to email and sporadic browsing of websites, like Tesco with whom I did online shopping. By the time we reached the summer of 2012 things had changed big time.

I guess the first moments of frustration occurred when we bought a new television to replace our ten year old Sony. We bought an all singing, all dancing LG TV; an HD, 3D, flat screen LCD set with internet connectivity. Brilliant, except the internet connection at our address means that to watch a 30 minute programme on the BBC iPlayer you’d better allow an hour or so  to account for the amount of time you’ll watch the little circle spin in the centre of the screen with the dread word “Buffering” below it. I phoned our ISP; your download speed is limited by your BT line, they said; sorry but what you’ve got is all you’ll get. Time to upgrade I thought, and as luck would have it a leaflet from Virgin Media had just popped through my letterbox. “Over 80% of your neighbourhood is connected” it said and went on to detail all of the delights of being a Virgin Media customer. Now I used to be a Virgin Mobile customer, as did my wife and both of my daughters, but we all decamped to 3, largely because they offered a better range of phones but I had no problem with subscribing to Virgin for my TV, broadband and landline phone especially as they said we’d get download speeds of up to 20Mb when I phoned them. The package seemed even more attractive when we worked out that the cost of TV, broadband and landline with Virgin was cheaper than our BT landline and our broadband through Plusnet combined. I did raise the point that I’d been previously told that our address wasn’t serviceable, but was assured that it was. Installation was set for 15^th September. Our Welcome Pack arrived; “Sit back and relax” it said; surely the words that strike more terror in anyone other than “some self assembly required.”

Come the day and the Virgin Media engineer arrived with our shiny new TiVo box and our equally shiny broadband hub. He started wiring it all up to the TV and all looked promising. Then he asked the question that sent the whole affair into the stuff of nightmares. Where, he asked does the cable come into the house? I showed him the pipe at the side of the house; there was no cable in the pipe. No problem, he said, we’ll get a team round to connect you up and sure enough, later that morning two guys arrived with a huge reel of cable that they proceeded to push through the pipe until they reached an obstruction. At this point the whole thing unravelled faster than a ball of wool in the paws of a playful kitten. It turned out that we needed a construction team to clear the obstruction. Later that day I phoned Virgin; a new installation date was set for 9^th October, with the construction team coming on the 5^th to do the necessary work. No one came on the 5^th, so on the 8^th I phoned Virgin again. “Don’t worry,” said a nice man called Akil, “the construction team will attend before the installation.” They did not, so the engineer who arrived on the 9^th to install the TiVo box and broadband hub went away with the task not completed.

A further phone call to Virgin and a new installation date of 26^th October was set. A new Welcome Pack arrived; “Sit back and relax” it said; I didn’t as I had a sense of foreboding. Which proved well founded when the engineer arrived; a team even arrived to dig up the road if necessary. Your address is not serviceable we were told, so I phoned Virgin again. I know that the Data Protection Act probably prohibits you from telling me this, I said, but do any houses in my street have Virgin Media? Yes, came the reply (obviously answering my question either didn’t infringe the Data Protection Act or the person I spoke to wasn’t aware that it did). They gave me the house numbers, one is my next door neighbour, another was a house three doors away on the other side. I went and spoke to our neighbour; yes, we’re with Virgin they said. What speeds do you get? I asked. “Up to 20Mb” they said.

So, on the one hand we have one person from Virgin telling me that my address is not serviceable, and another telling me that it is. I have a neighbour on one side who gets Virgin, and another a few doors along in the other direction who does too, so why can’t I? Well, the upshot is that the conduit that carries the cable to my property runs under the garden of my other neighbour (who is not a Virgin customer as far as I know) and it appears that there is the blockage in that area. “You need to get your neighbour’s permission to work on his property to clear the blockage” we were told. My wife spoke to our neighbour; he asked for £1,000 to allow the work to be done. Well no way were we going to pay that, and apparently neither would Virgin. I say apparently, because since November we’ve had no contact from them; no phone call, no email, no letter saying that our installation can’t proceed although I assume that that is the case. It would have been nice to have had some sort of communication on the lines of “Awfully sorry, but we can’t do anything” rather than the matter just fizzling out.

It is frustrating because I want to be a Virgin Media customer; I want to use their services, I want superfast broadband, I want Virgin TV but apparently I can’t have it. Now you might say that my argument should be with my neighbour as he’s the one obstructing things, but I live on a modern estate, it was built only fifteen years ago, I know people who live in houses that were built a hundred years ago that have cable TV and broadband and as I said at the top of this piece, the internet is going to be a significant channel for delivering TV in the future and I’m being left behind; surely it is not beyond the wit of man (or Virgin) to arrange cable connectivity to a fifteen year old property?

Having given up on Virgin (for the moment at least), I looked at BT Infinity who apparently offer download speeds of up to 76Mb! Is BT Infinity available in my area? The answer, as you’ve probably guessed is No. When will it be available in my area? That’s anybody’s guess; I phoned BT and they couldn’t tell me.

Even more frustrating is the fact that I still get regular communications from Virgin Media; a letter popped through my letterbox only a few days ago; “Over 80% of your neighbourhood is connected” it said; apparently I am destined to remain one of the 20% who isn’t.

Anyway rant over, I’m now going to try and download a film from iTunes. Next week I’ll tell you if it’s any good, assuming it has finished downloading by then.