Well Perhaps
If they stop hiking up there prices.
Come up with a better pricing system.. (I don’t want your sodding land line or TiVo)
Deliver the speeds they promise.
And sort out them dreadful super duds
UK cable giant Virgin Media is closing 30 shops and cutting 250 jobs – including a number of head office people – as a result of botching its £3bn Project Lightning superfast broadband plan. Numerous sources got in touch with El Reg to tell us that 28 posts are being cut in Virgin’s Hammersmith HQ in London, along with the …
I was going to pile in with the their incessant "To The Owner" junk mail they're renowned for sending out (and the associated cost) but for once I can't. Vermin Media was connected to my house* but in the last 18 months I've had two, if that. In the few years before that I was getting at least 1 junk mail envelope every 6 weeks.
Either they've realised the blanket junk mailing isn't worth it or things are so tough they can't even afford it.
*When the previous occupants had VM the installer must have hijacked the BT cabling and routed the VM phone line through BT's cabling to the BT Master socket. When I moved in and switched back to an unbundled BT OR line, the BTOR installer grumbled and muttered something about "They're always bloody doing this" as he removed the VM cabling from the junction box on the BT cable in the porch (i.e. BT's property).
"He just licenses the brand to them for a few £mill per year."
It only takes one poorly performing franchisee to blacken the name of all the others in unrelated businesses.
Virgin Wines email spam, Virgin Media junk mail, Virgin dirty Trains, and Virgin slow service Record stores made me boycott anything with Virgin in its branding.
Recently I donated to crowdfunding that was via Virgin Money Giving. It was a pleasant surprise to find they are non-profit and appear to charge the recipients far less in the way of fees than do other similar operations.
My Broadband 200Mb with VM is really good. My phone and TV service are good too. We've already dumped their mobile phone network because of high prices and poor service. Please don't say that the rest of their services are going to go the same way. Increase cost and reduce service. Please no. I don't want to have to mess around with changing a set-up that works well for me.
"[...] you tube videos frequently end up buffering [...]"
Are you using the same browser? On my laptop streamed videos buffer quite often on Firefox - yet Chrome runs the same ones smoothly.
Not a new phenomenon for Virigin media customers:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/07/virgin_media_youtube_buffering_issues_again/
This is a well known VM issue. I had their 70mb service, dropped to BT's 52mb and can now stream 4K youtube without buffering. On VM it was unuseable.
Plus my pings are sub 15ms instead of being 30ms+
VM's 'headline' speeds are BS. You do get the headline rate in some areas but the QOS is rubbish.
My freshly installed BT fibre line syncs at about 55mb, so no point in me getting a faster BT connection but the QOS is awesome in comparison to VM and at less than half the price I was paying.
Buy yourself a decent router, which Ethernet, VDSL, ADSL, 4G, etc..
Put the VM Ethernet cable from the hub (in modem mode) in one port.
Put an RJ11 ADSL/VDSL connection in the other.
Put a 4G stick / SIM in for emergencies.
Configure the routing/failover options on it.
Pay for two "less speedy" connections without all the associated gumph, so that when one falls over you don't even notice except for the email from the router saying that it's fallen back to something else. If you buy a decent enough router, it'll even load-balance over them without you knowing the difference (I set this up on an ancient PC once with Linux, over two really-flaky ADSL lines, and every webpage you accessed or port you opened could have gone over either connection and you'd never know any difference).
Literally, a couple-of-hundred-quid investment that will last for years and solve all the problems for you by doing what people in IT do (always have a backup, redundant systems, etc.). And there are many advantages ("Oh well, it's your connection!", really? Because I have three!), you can always move it anywhere, to any ISP, at any moment. Hell, I can even run the whole home network run off my phone's 4G offered over wireless as a "WAN" connection if I like.
If you have a number of fluctuating qualities of service, take steps to reduce your dependency on any one of them and cover your bases. 200Mbps costs what?
I'd rather have two independent 50Mbps services than even a 200Mbps SPOF.
Sure this is related to Lightning and isn't due to 'Business as Usual' changes? Were you actually told that this was due to Lightning or have you put 2 and 2 together?
The Lightning snafu has caused cost overruns which will be recouped either by passing fewer premises or cost underruns on the rest of the project. The stores, etc, just weren't worth keeping open. In Leeds for example there are two of them a matter of a few minutes walk from one another and they hardly ever seem to have any punters in them. There's also the standard 'pop up' store as well.
I'm not sure this'll help anything - been waiting for Virgin to install Fibre in my flat since late April (unable to get BT FTTC services - Exchange Only line). I'm currently awaiting an update from the "Lightning Hot Desk" regarding some outstanding construction work - the left hand doesn't know how to co-ordinate with the right hand, never mind what it's doing...
I changed to Virgin Media and went all in (claims of up to 200Mb download (whatever!) , TV, phone) after 7 years in Sky and cannot wait to switch to another provider.
I WFH 3-4 days a week and connect to systems all around the world and at least once a month the internet goes down and when I can be bothered to ring they always blame it on maintenance. Well, working for Cloud IaaS provider our goal is to deliver maintenance in a seamless manner, and regardless of whether it is impacting or non impacting, we let our customers know!
Virgin Media have been as MASSIVE disappointment, especially after switching to them having been with Sky for 7 years (BTW, I had a free 10Mb broadband and it was far more reliable than this crappy service).