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Virgin Media Broadband - Negotiate ?

Big Tabs

Big Tabs

looking backwards, going forwards
We have been with virgin media for over 10 years and we are in a fibre optic cable area

(whole town was 'Diamond Cabled' years ago)

We have Broadband only.

A few months ago our bill went up to £37.50 a month - speeds up to 100 megabytes/sec.

I telephoned them and got nowhere. (this approach as usually resulted in a price reduction - 'Loyalty bonus' b.s.)

Today I called virgin media again (only had to wait 20 mins..) to tell them to stuff it.

After being offered £30.30 / month and my reply saying that they can transfer me to cancellations, I eventually get offered an 18 month contract at £25.50.

This is close enough to what Uswitch was showing I could get with Talk Talk, Sky etc.

So a £12 a month reduction in price for the sake of a phone call.

Not a bad result.


Out of Interest:

I am using an old hp laptop. The router is upstairs and not in the room above me (? 30' away plus walls)

SamKnows Speed Test results.

Download 54.1 Mbps. Upload 10.3 Mbps. Latency 22.5 s.
 
Nice one - just gone through the same myself.

Tip - always ring during UK office hours. UK call centre staff seem to have more autonomy to grant the discount. Calling later means the telephone rep has to go through their script, deny they can do anything to help and then reluctantly pass it back to the UK if you stick to your guns and threaten to leave.
 
Are you on Adsl or fibre?

I would phone them if on fibre and tell them the results and make sure they upgrade your hub. When I had crap speeds they put like an inteuator thingy in the line which fixed it
 
4G wifi is an option in a Virgin monopoly cable area. My daughter has Talk Talk unlimited monthly contract £20 a month
 
garyi said:
Are you on Adsl or fibre?

I would phone them if on fibre and tell them the results and make sure they upgrade your hub. When I had crap speeds they put like an inteuator thingy in the line which fixed it
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fibre I think.

The speed is plenty fast enough for our needs. We have no drop-outs in the house. My impression is that the speeds I quoted are good for wifi.
 
Just did this with BT. I’ve had no issues with them, but they wanted to charge daft money. Rang them, go good reduction and their latest router, which work fine for me.
 
I did mention on the Lockdown thread a while ago that I’d cancelled my Virgin account. It went up to 68 quid and I finally threw in the towel. The contract was due to end on July 10th and at the beginning of July a bloke rang me and offered me the same deal for 24 quid a month if I’d stay. Needless to say I’m still with Virgin for the time being.
 
Managed to get a quad-play for 50 quid today. Will call again in a few months to see how firm that is.

Moneysaving expert has a number of articles on how to negotiate with Virgin, Sky etc, btw.
 
Thing is with virgin its damn fast and faster than most of the ADSL stuff out there. You just have to play the game each year.

As it goes I have gone virgin business this year, just because of the superb contact, you can email or phone them and get straight through, the downside being they arn't open evenings and weekends. Thing is its the same network, so unless something goes belly up within my house, any issues will be reported by customers on the normal network and my fix will be coming :)

I hear there is a threat of 1gig both ways coming as well. That should be fun/unnecessary
 
very good , we pay 49 quid for virgin 100mps plus unlimited calls landline . more than happy with that and their service after years of misery with those scoundrels at talk talk who get worse !!!! my neighbour who is very elderly has just spent 2-3 months trying to get talk talk with no success .. gave up in the end
 
My feeling is that all the big telecoms companies are complete bastards at customer service. They are deliberately hostile, impossible to contact or both. I had to report a phone fault to Virgin by text message/community forum the other week, they took two days to get back to me (luckily the fault had self rectified).

Has anyone come across one year contracts recently? I should change my mother’s, she’s on a month to month paying way too much (BT) but 18 months is too long.
 
Just ditched all things Virginmedia after my iphone on contract packed up with 14 months to run. They wouldn’t do anything about it despite it being on a three year finance deal. Rather have slightly slower broadband than give them a penny more of my money, I had been with them for the best part of 30 years from when it was NTL. Both have perhaps the worst customer service on the planet.
 
Rodrat said:
Just ditched all things Virginmedia after my iphone on contract packed up with 14 months to run. They wouldn’t do anything about it despite it being on a three year finance deal. Rather have slightly slower broadband than give them a penny more of my money, I had been with them for the best part of 30 years from when it was NTL. Both have perhaps the worst customer service on the planet.
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Good for you. They're an absolute shower. It's the only way to deal with them and I have to say when I cancelled after 25 years I felt kind of liberated. You'll most likely get a call from higher up the chain offering to sort things out. I'm still using my ntlworld email address after all these years!
 
Seeker_UK said:
If you're connected via WiFi and the laptop is running an internal 802.11G connection, 54.1 is as fast as you'll get regardless.
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And more to the point probably all you will ever need, the obsession with max speeds on broadband connections is genuinely amusing.
 
oldius said:
My experience of Virgin is utterly appalling customer service.
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I'm a Virgin customer and all to aware of the 'challenge' of dealing with them but they're a breeze compared to Talk Talk who were a nightmare when trying to sort out a fault with my parent's broadband.

The only one I've found friendly was Sky and that was probably because they were taking my parents on as new customers.
 
My experience of Virgin has been broadly very positive over the years. It may help that I am tech savvy, it may also help that (Touch wood) my area seems to be reasonably stable.
When I have had to call customer service its been fine if a little difficult to understand, although recently with covid its been hard work.
Moving to virgin business is a revelation. We did not want TV or Phone, the costs are exactly the same against residential for 360 meg broadband although we do have to pay VAT now.

A phone call is just that you call a number and someone in the uk picks up and says 'Hi Virgin Business, how may I help?'

Or you can email them and they come back to you within a few hours.

I consider ISPs just like delivery companies, every single one of them has their problems and someone will say what a shower of shite XYZ was because my broadband didnt work or my package got dropped.

Its just the luck of the draw on a given day in my opinion.
 
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