Virgin Broadband www.virginmedia.com

Try to leave without paying 2-3 months extra for a service you are not using - in my experience no chance. Try to get through to talk to somebody to raise a complaint - expect to wait 2-3 hours. Expect them to respond to messages on their complaint system. No chance. I will NEVER use them again, you'd be advised not to waste your money on them as well.

Every week from the moment I took Virgin Broadband, Phone & TV I was having 1-2 hours outage every Friday. Could almost set my watch to it.

Follow on with at least an hour of pointless testing through an app which told me nothing was wrong, then 20-30 minutes online and on a phoneline desperately trying to speak to something other than a 'bot' (I could even stomach listening to a cat meowing rather then a patronising bot telling me nothing is wrong) and then finally I get to speak to someone; who takes me through all of the checks all-over again and then disappears on hold for 5 minutes and hey-presto its all working; wow! It fixes itself each time after about 2 hours! Except they maintained there's nothing wrong.

On the last occasion it was a whole day... They then admitted there was a long standing fault and that if I wanted faultless internet I would need to pay for a business connection! They 'fixed it' and I informed them I was cancelling my direct debit until they paid back for all of the outages. They never did.

2 Months later and I still have no direct debit in place and am not inclined to put one in; but a robot phoned to tell me to pay my outstanding bill or be cut-off! Yes - a robot.

Unfortunately their online systems won't accept payment though bizarrely they all seem primed to accept a Direct Debit; and when you enquire for someone else who wants to purchase a package you get to speak to a human being in literally seconds.

I used to work for Virgin Atlantic and know Sir Richard Branson licenses the name to this appalling organisation; to be honest knowing he doesn't care about his brand anymore means I will probably never fly Virgin Atlantic again either.

As for Virgin Media - its a complete disgrace. If I could give Zero Stars for all aspects I would.

This review covers Virgin Media broadband and telephone.

I'll start with the broadband service itself. Here I have no complaints. In five years of use we have only had scheduled outages for the broadband, for which we have had notice in advance. One phone issue, solved in a few days and we use our mobiles for calls so the landline is not really an issue. It's the same price with or without the phone when I come to contract renewal. For some reason they seem keen to keep phone customers.

With broadband, there is a caveat. I use the Virgin Media hub in modem mode. Routing & firewalling is done using a mini PC running a Linux distro and I use industrial grade wireless networking kit from Ubiquiti for our WiFi, so not your usual setup. That being the case I cannot comment on the Virgin Media hub as a router and Wifi box.

I have had no issues with port blocking and no problems with either incoming or outgoing VPN connections.

My beef is with the overseas call handling. The last contract renewal call kept getting routed to somewhere in the Indian sub-continent and the communication barrier was so bad they may as well have been using their native language.

Again I am not the average caller as I have a hearing problem (tinnitus) that for me means that if people speak too quickly, the words become a jumble of noise. Now that can happen with native English speakers but try as I might I could not make sense of what Virgin Media's overseas operators were saying. I suspect they are under pressure to keep call times short and so they rattle through whatever script they are reading and that combined with their accent makes for unintelligible gibberish. It took a couple of calls to get an operator who, if they spoke slowly enough, could just about be understood. Even then I kept having to ask for them to repeat their last sentence, which makes for a long call.....

So, Virgin Media. Your broadband service is reliable but your customer is absolutely abysmal, especially for those with hearing difficulties.

Finally, price. They are not cheap but having had endless problems with Openreach technicians keep borrowing our wire pair to fix other people's problems when we had broadband over their network, I consider the additional cost of Virgin Media to be justified. Phone and broadband costs me £32 at the time of writing, which is a tenner more than introductory offers from providers using Openreach, but what price do you put on your time if you are constantly having to complain because some idle technician has used your wires to fix another issue, and all the while your internet connection is off.

Yes you can use a laptop and a mobile as a wireless modem but that's a temporary solution to unreliable broadband. I will stump up the extra for reliability.

Would I recommend it? Maybe. If you have OpenReach issues and Virgin Media is available then Yes. If you have had no wiring issues in the past with Openreach then no as their 60+ Mbs service is plenty fast enough for home use and can be had much cheaper.

I have one tab open that is using my Wi-Fi, (for example Zoom) and even when I don't have my phone connected to the internet and living with my parents the Wi-Fi keeps disconnecting from every 1-5 minutes and I have to restart the internet connection on my computer in order to be able to continue to access the meeting, this is absolutely atrocious and Virgin really needs to look into this with more detail as the amount of money that we pay for the internet is really not worth it for the terrible Wi-Fi that we receive. It gets worse when I like to play videogames in the evening and it just goes downhill from there. I cannot get stable connections even in a 10 minute game such as paladins, I disconnect from the game about 3 times in one game and when I play League Of Legends which is usually 30-40 minutes per game I disconnect about 15 times which is just a joke. The router I have is the Hub 3.0 and it is absolutely terrible.

Criminally bad service. Criminally baf customer services. Criminally high prices.

Costomer services are a waste of time, cancelled contract, received phone call offering me a better deal..I declined, received email saying sorry you leaving and give feed back. Still charging me for a service I dont have. After more than 3 hours on the phone... been pass from one person to another..one said phone line was still active the other the broadband. We will cancel it today but you will be charged for another 30 days, that's more than 2 months after cancellation and broadband switching off. Virgin is a joke, how hard is it to switch. Waiting for final bill then sending everything to ofsted. I would give a negative score for customer services if I could.

I need a VPN to work from home. Trouble is it keeps dropping out. Virgins nody service tester says all is fine, but check the router status it shows the dropouts.

I spent 45 mins waiting to talk to customer services. Their first step, tell e all is fine, then try to get me to switch to a higher speed service. WHn I said no they passed me on to Gadget Rescue. Wonderful team who instantly said the issue is the vPN and they need access to my laptop and details of the server connection, plus £20 upfront and another 5 quid/month to try to get the system to the job its meant to do.

Hint (Colleagues with other ISPS like BT and Talk-Talk DO NOT HAVE THIS PROBLEM.

Paying for 500mbps but the very best independent speed test has shown 31mbps download. Things got so bad that downloads were filling the screen one line at a time, it was like being back in the days of 1990s dial up. Virgin refused to admit anything was wrong but said they would reset my equipment remotely, now I'm back to around 30mbps. Utterly atrocious service and even worse value for money.

Hit and miss to say the least, weeks go by with intermittent or no service but you will not receive a refund because they say it has to be out for two full days, so even if you get a minutes service in 48 hours they keep your money. Domestic faults take weeks to be resolved and when an engineer does turn up they make out they are doing you a favour. Avoid at all costs, works less than 70 percent of the time.

I have cancelled my broadband and tv package due to price increases and I gave a months notice to cancel.I sent back the equipment over a week ago, and have received an email and text saying that you are going to take £130 from my bank account even though I do not owe any money. I have tried to speak to one of your customer service representatives today, but got no satisfaction as your processes and procedures have become so rigid and lacking in common sense that they leave your customers absolutely raging with frustration as they do not involve proper communication with customers ! I cancelled my virgin media in August, which gave you a month to send the packaging for me to send the equipment back so I could return it when my account with you ended on 1st September. Instead you decided to wait and then sent the parcel when I was on holiday and left it with my next door neighbour. When I returned from holiday I received a text saying you were going to charge me for the equipment if I didn’t send it back! I phoned you right away to explain that I had just returned from holiday, and I returned the parcel that same day ! I have now over a week after returning the parcel been sent this email which I am replying too.

I now intend to cancel my virgin mobile contract too as I am disgusted with your customer service and will never return to your incompetent company