Virgin on the Ridiculous - Part Two

Regular readers, and it's gratifying to note that I have some, will recall the trials and tribulations that I had last year when I foolishly (as it turned out) signed up for Virgin Media. To recap, after a number of visits from various engineers, it was concluded that my address wasn't serviceable because there was no cable actually running into my property. To install the cabling the engineers would require access to my neighbour's garden and he expected to be paid £1,000 to give permission for that. As neither I nor Virgin were prepared to pay, that appeared to be the end of the matter. Having abandoned the idea of Virgin, I explored the idea of BT's fibre optic product Infinity, but it wasn't yet available in my area, so we struggled on with our existing broadband and its snail paced speeds of less than 2Mbps.

Then in March at the Ideal Home Show, my wife and I visited the Virgin Media stand, more out of devilment than anything else really. We gave them a cut down version of our experiences to date, but they were quite insistent that there would be no problem in our having Virgin Media installed. One of the ironies was that like us, one of the chaps working the stand told us that he regularly received mail from Virgin urging him to sign up, but he couldn't because his street had no cable at all. Anyway, we signed up and were given an installation date of 13th April. The absence of any cable running into our property was dismissed as a mere bagatelle; engineers would call on the preceding day to make good that omission (allegedly).

I have to say that I wasn't entirely filled with confidence, but hey ho, what was the worst that could happen?

A few days later, with immaculately poor timing, I received an email from my existing ISP (Plusnet) offering fibre optic broadband, which had just become available in my area. This created a dilemma; cancelling Virgin would cost me £25 but if I did nothing then either I would get Virgin, whose advertised speeds in my area weren't quite as good as Plusnet or more likely I would get my £25 back when Virgin admitted defeat. In the end I decided to let Virgin come and see what happened.

Events then took a different turn when we came back from a few days in Spain to find that our broadband had given up the ghost. I tried the usual remedial technique, i.e. turn the router off and on again, but with no joy. I phoned  Plusnet who went away and did some checks. The next day our broadband connection was spontaneously restored, although it crept along at speeds reminiscent of dial-up. To cut a long story short, it then gave up on us again and an engineer called, identified a problem on the line, which he fixed and we were up and running again, albeit still pretty slowly.

Virgin Media were still due to call just three days hence, but after some discussion we decided to cancel them and opt for Plusnet’s fibre optic broadband. When we phoned up to place the order we were offered their phone package too, and with that and the broadband together, it works out cheaper than our existing broadband and line rental with BT. And here's the thing with BT; I pay an extortionate amount each month to them so I phoned them recently querying this and having checked my bill later, find that I am over £100 in credit. This is one of those drawbacks of paying your bills by monthly Direct Debit; budgeting is easier but you often end up with large credit balances which is good for the company, but not so good for the payer!

I have to say that despite cancelling the appointments with Virgin, I had a sneaking feeling that they would still turn up and sure enough they arrived on Friday at half past five in the afternoon to install the cabling. Well that was their plan although quite how they intended to do this wasn't something they were very clear on. I was only slightly surprised that they didn't return the next day to actually try and install the TiVo box and broadband hub.

Having burned our bridges with Virgin, I had a horrible feeling that the engineer would arrive to install our fibre optic broadband, only to find some insuperable problem that would leave us stuck with the existing connection. As you can tell, I am not the most optimistic of people!

Fortunately the installation went ahead and I ran a speed test for the hell of it. Monday, pre fibre optic, download 1.6Mbps, upload 0.4Mbps; Tuesday, post fibre optic, 65Mbps and 15 Mbps respectively, somewhat surpassing the speeds offered by Virgin in my area. (See footnote). If my fascination with, and the pleasure I take in the speeds I am now getting seems a little immature, then I can only say that this is because I have been struggling these last few months with broadband speeds that have been positively antediluvian.

Of course it's early days and could yet go horribly wrong (I told you I wasn't an optimist) but I've been a Plusnet customer since dial up days back in the 1990’s and they've always been pretty good. This year they picked up the “Best Customer Rated Broadband” award from uSwitch, but if you search for reviews of their services on the Internet you will find lots of customers and ex customers complaining about them. Mind you, if you look for reviews of most service providers, be they energy companies, banks or media companies including ISP’s you will find plenty of negative comments. And there is the rub, because apparently when people receive poor service they tell, on average 19 people but tell on average fewer than three people when they receive good service. 

Human nature being what it is we relish the opportunity for a good old moan; when things go well we keep quiet for fear of jinxing it and inevitably expect this not to last so that soon we will have something to jolly well moan about!

Reviews and other people's experiences are valuable to a point, but ultimately the moral of the story with most things you have to trust your own judgement and experience; if it works for you, stick with it. If it doesn't, then give it the old heave ho.

And now I'm off to watch BBC iPlayer on the television, sans buffering, simply because now, I can!

Postscript: I originally intended publishing this piece a week ago, but held it back for two reasons. Firstly, the Luis Suarez incident suggested itself for a more topical blog, but secondly after my initial euphoria at the download speeds I was getting, they dropped to under 2Mbps. My pessimism appeared well founded. The cause was apparently a stuck speed profile which has been fixed, although at any sign of pages being slow to load, I am running a speed test!

Footnote: These speeds were gathered from uswitch.com, who apparently are a tad unreliable in this field. My ISP told me (when I was experiencing some difficulties), that the best broadband speed test is to be found here at BT Wholesale which showed me my speeds were 40Mbps download and 10Mbps upload; still not too shabby.