Vodafone eyes up Liberty Global – report Mobile giant Vodafone has reportedly been mulling over a number of takeover plans, including the possibility of scooping up cable company Liberty Global – Virgin Media's owner. According to Reuters, which cited five anonymous sources close to the matter, Vodafone could see Liberty Global's European operations as a natural fit …
As a customer of Virgin Media with mostly positive experiences I can say a big "NO" to Vodafail as a former customer with all negative experiences. Naturally I have no say in this because money talks louder than customers even if it's the customers that make you the money. They can happily go fuck themselves. Expensive, poor service, disinterested sales reps in stores the times I had to visit one for a phone repair. If you're not on a £££ contract then you're not worth their time and aren't worth their attention. I do not want to experience their idea of service ever again.
To be fair uninterested reps are fairly common across the board - most these days are just salesmen, and if you go in there for anything else you'll get the default 'call our phone number' response.
I had this problem when dealing with 3UK and filtering, as I wanted it removed and the website tells me that this can be done from within the shop (I see no reason to hand over additional credit card information just to prove my age - especially to stop something I never asked for). Even then they refused to help.
In the UK it seems like we're just here to be fucked over, and made to pay for it.
This comes on the evening when my daughter discovered that Virgin hadn't sent her the promised text as her monthly data allowance was running low. Then when it reached zero and we tried to buy a bigger allowance weren't able to do anything because their systems were off line until Sunday midday.
Mobile, cable, POTS. It doesn't matter which.
We're just the meat in a corporate buffet.
I had no say when Virgin Mobile (which I used to like) became part of Liberty, even though I had a contract with Virgin. And which I have already started to loath, as the deals have become so much poorer and the customer service worse. Two of our family phones are now elsewhere and a third about to move. A year ago I would never have considered this.
I had no say when my cable company (Cable London), which I liked, was swallowed up by C&W, (which I didn't) which then became NTL, and is now Virgin; which to be fair I do like. So far.
Footnote.
Today I am on the phone to VM again.
The first call agent took my explanationof the problem, then cut me off.
The second left me on hold for 20 minutes (before I hung up and called back again) after she said she was checking my account.
Still waiting in a queue now.
After praising VM to colleagues on Monday, on grounds of stability and reliability, I have lost two and a half days of service over two incidents. 4 hours on Tuesday and then a full 2 solid days from Thursday lunchtime. I was working from home on Thursday, so yes, it really was very inconvenient.
They were able to get the SuperHubs synching after about 9 hours, but with consistent 20-30% packet loss from then until the problem was officially fixed around late Saturday morning, I wouldn't say they could call it usable or fit for purpose, during that time.
Almost feels like an exercise in managing ongoing customer expectations. Please don't do this to VirginMedia customers,VM and Vodafone! My VM broadband service is one of the few things in life that I am happy to pay for and feel that I get good value for money.
Just wondering.
Is it possible to have a Virgin Media internet access and a BT (or a LLU) at the same time?
If I was working from home and relied on internet I think I would get a backup/second provider.
I guess there's always the mobile tethering option.
I see no reason why not. I've currently got VM cable just for the telly, plus a BT line (that I had to get re-enabled) for DSL with my preferred ISP, Demon. No way was I getting VM as ISP after their Phorm naughtiness, though the combo deal would have been a lot cheaper.
Unfortunately, Demon are currently owned by ... Vodafone.
I'm Virgin Media customer of several years.
I'm a Vodafone customer of almost two years.
Virgin Media, overall I've found to be very reliable. Unaffected by bad weather (not-so with Sky/Freeview), broadband which is 8x faster than the fastest BT Infinity package in the area, and fault-fix service which is unrivalled - on the few occasions I've had a fault, they've been out to me within a day or two.
Vodafone, despite the bad press, and general hatred for them on The Register, I've found a breath of fresh air compared to EE! Sure, they don't quite have the 3G/4G spread of coverage - YET - but more of my calls are successful, I have at least a 2G signal in many areas where the other networks don't have any signal at all, and the 4G service (where it has been rolled out) is brilliant.
A few gripes with the 'communication issues' when dealing with non-UK contact centres, as with many companies out there, but overall a positive experience.
"Might be a good thing... "
It most certainly won't. When you do a corporate acqusition there's two extra buckets of cost: "acquisition premium" and "transaction costs". The former are typically about a quarter to a third more than the true value of the business, the second is some number that invariably ends in the word "billion". Both of these costs can only be recovered by either having some magic sauce that shrinks costs by an unfeasible amount, or in the real world by reaming out the customers with higher bills.
The latter is what happened when VM sold out to Liberty Global, and the same thing will happen again when the Cable Cowboy sells out to a company stupid enough to buy a business for a premium over what they could have secured VM for in the first place. So the Cable Cowboy, already a billionaire, saunters off into the sunset richer by several billion dollars, and Vodafone work out how to shaft the cable customer base with several years of double digit cost increases, hidden in charging & T&C changes as best they can.
If you think that there will be any synergies or worthwhile improvements in performance you're mistaken, because all the cash that might have been invested in tangible fixed assets has instead been paid to Liberty Global, and accounted by Vodafone as "intangible fixed assets" and will eventually be amortised away or written off. Likewise there will be no improvement in customer service because Vodafone will adopt whichever is the cheapest standards of VM or its own customer service philosophies.
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