Virgin Media Broadband Speeds, Not What They Seem
In this day and age we all need a good and reliable broadband supplier, especially if we work from home and or use the internet for recreational actives such as gaming or live streaming.
For me being in London, UK finding a fast reliable broadband supplier should be simple right.
Not so simple…
Virgin Media claims to be the fastest broadband supplier in my area, if not in the whole country. uswitch claim that Virgin Media can supply 300mbs to my door. However, the sad fact is that Virgin Media have a very bad infrastructure and over utilization problem in many areas, (their own words) including where I live, in London so they are not actually able to supply the speeds that they advertise.
Virgin Media Broadband Speeds, Not What They Seem
Here are the facts, not from all me, but from the BBC, From BBC Watch Dog, From Twitter Tweets and From The Register..
The BBC News picked up on this when BBC Watchdog investigated claims that Virgin Media were not fulfilling promises of fast broadband.
Quote from the BBC article — Virgin Media falling short on broadband speeds
Virgin Media customers in the affected areas were struggling to complete tasks such as streaming video, listening to music and downloading games, despite paying for speeds of about 200Mbps, Watchdog found.
Hundreds of customers like me at times are getting as little 3% of speeds promised.
Tom Mockridge the CEO admitted on the program that it was a problem relating to over-utilization and said that it was just teething problems.
I for one have had problems with Virgin Media for years — since 2011 in fact— Teething problems?
2011 was when Virgin Media claimed that they needed to put more cables down as the others were crushed but they weren’t able to fix it now as it was going to cost £10,000
This seems acceptable to Virgin Media as yet again we as customers are offered a free upgrade and or a discount until the problem is solved, which we accept and put up with because
a) I think they will keep their word and fix the broadband
b) it’s better than the alternatives
c) hope
On a side note, customer service is so bad now being only available by phone call, its painful to sort anything out with them.
Moving on now to 2015 when, this time, Virgin Media told me the reason I was getting 3mbs broadband download speeds rather than the 100mbs I was promised was due to an infrastructure problem, there were just too many people on the line and which needs updating to cope with the amount of demand.
So I wonder how are Virgin Media allowed to keep adding new customers when they can’t supply existing customers?
In October 2015 I’d been told the latest problem in my area would be fixed in January 2016, and eventually it was but only for a few months and we were back again to bad speeds and dropped connections.
I was interested to find out if anyone else was having this problem so I looked on Twitter and the Virgin Media” tweets echoed the complaints I was having and I recorded the tweets I found here…
My broadband problems continue throughout 2017 —but not so bad that I couldn’t work until May when I also found out via the internet that these problems were affecting half of the South East. Which again I recorded using Storify on the 12th July 2017
Virgin Media down for 3 hours in the South East
August 2017 has been a terrible month for my super-fast Virgin Media broadband — 200mbps gamer package…
The crunch came about 4 weeks ago when my internet had been down for 24 hours. While they “fixed broken cables” of course; the following week the company were fixing more broken cables and again, the next week they were still fixing broken cables.
More recently The Register also noticed this trend of many people taking to twitter to complain and reported a major South East Outage for Virgin Media customers!
My own super-speed broadband has been reported now as “an issue” and I was informed during a webchat which I insisted on that it won’t be fixed until January 2018. And I accepted the discount of £15 a month while the issue is being sorted out. Which got me wondering if other customers are being offered similar discounts.
Why don’t we just give up and change suppliers — I must say it has come very very close for me several times, but sadly all of the other broadband suppliers I have looked at so far have been honest in telling me that they cannot promise more than 30mbs into my property, which isn’t enough.
So, basically I’m stuck with hoping that one day Virgin Media will have to live up to their promise and fix their broadband service. In the meantime, my plan is to get another broadband supplier as backup for when Virgin Media inevitably fail once more.
BBC Quote
(From above article)
At the end of May 2017, Mr. Mockridge said 100Mbps would now be the “broadband standard” for the company and the industry needed to improve the way it advertised speeds, so customers were not “hoodwinked”
Virgin Media continues to offer 200mbps in my area, where they categorically cannot provide it continuously.
I would love to hear your opinions on Virgin Media, I know it’s not just me who has all of these problems.
Authors Own Images.
