Virgin cuts broadband to a fiver

Hmmm ...

Even a fiver is too much for their broadband

It's a con

Mobile broadband is a big fat con. Despite assurances to the contrary there is still a huge number of people in the UK for whom mobile broadband is either not available or piteously slow and unrelaible. Often the reality directly opposes the information available from the availability checkers. Rather than cutting prices for those that can have high speed coverage the providers should be forced to increase high speed coverage at a higer, erm, speed. The only way to do this is to set targets and enforce hefty fines when they are not met.

The cable market is even worse. When there was competition in the cable market providers were under pressure to extend coverage. Now Virgin have a complete monopoly expansion has all but stopped.

Both cable and mobile broadband are easy ways for providers to make huge amounts of money from densely populated areas, and not the public service the providers claim them to be. They will be no pressure to expand coverageuntil the existing markets stagnate.

Tired

It's a shame very few of the VM staff know about this yet.

After being pinged around the globe on a crackly VoIP network, I finally got a few answers and the £5 per Gig penalty if you go over the measly 1 Gig cap immediately turned me off. There's also no integration between VIrgin Media and Mobile packages, so a mix 'n' match scenario with a bundled qwerty phone isn't possible either.

So, it's really just another VM Trojan horse with a belly full of thieves.

Once Virgin has opened your behind they will rape you

with Phorm.

Economies of lies

Pretend a whole 10% of the population have enough sense to get near enough the best deal for their requirements. Assume another 10% somehow avoid being sold overpriced crap, or something more expensive than they need. That leaves about 80% who have been mis-sold. Only "ten per cent of wireless broadband users feel mis-sold", so about 70% of customers are happy to pay extra for things they do not need or do not actually get.

With a customer base like that, what incentive is there for a provider to be honest?

Research?

"One can't help wondering if O2's research was slightly slanted"

It's pretty generous to call a press release from the marketing department research.

T mobile 'broadband'

is crap, typically worse than dial up, with occasional 100kB bursts. Downloading linux distros - bwahahahah. They're safe with the 3GB FUP, you've no chance of getting anywhere near it.

@Money back guarantees = guaranteed no customers

Best of luck proving the breach of contract; you have to document the crap download speeds, find the bit in the contract that says it's not their fault, get a lawyer to get round the bit that says it isn't their fault and be willing to bet the house on the court case. The 'regulator' doesn't give a flying fuck about any of this and won't help.

Costs of laying fibre

Anyone that complains that cable isn't available in their area unfortunately needs to consider the costs of laying fibre in the roads they live at; it isn't cheap and Virgin can't afford to do it everywhere. If Telewest or NTL could they probably would still be in business!

Moaning as a consumer is one thing, actually thinking about the business ramifications is another, which sucks but is the harsh reality... :-(

The joys of rustic wilderness !!

A mate of mine moved from a little hamlet near Avignon which had *finally* received broadband coverage last year to another hamlet near Bordeaux which has only dial-up service. The "culture shock" was palpable. If people insist on living rustically out in the sticks, they should expect to get the two-tins-on-a-string kind of service !!

Being a lifelong Londoner, I am highly underwhelmed by these complains !! So I pay more for living in London, but I get the benefits, too !! I have no problems with Virgin Broadband (both wired and wireless) !!

WYPIWYG - What You Pay Is What You Get !!

Ancient IT philosophy about peanuts and monkeys !!

NTL and Telewest

@ Andrew kirkpatrick

NTL are very well still in business. After merging with Telewest they bought out Virgin Mobile and re-branded themselves as Virgin Media with a 30 year exclusive brand licence with Virgin Enterprises to use the Virgin brand for their cable business. I guess they succeeded in what they wanted to do. People now think its a different company.

@Andrew Kirkpatrick

Who gives a flying f**k whether Virgin can afford to lay new cable. When they cornered the market they promised that they were going to invest heavilly in extending the cable network, presumably as a sop to those who opposed their monopoly. Of course they then went back on the promise. They made the promise and if they hadn't done the costings properly that's their hard luck, they should have done a better job of their calculations. If, OTOH, they had no intention of keeping their promise then they are the lyin sh*ts that all right thinking people think they are. Their only function in the telco market appears to be to make BT look good.

When I talk about competition in the cable market I'm not talking about NTL and Telewest. Short memory have you? Cable was introduced supposedly to increase comptetion and there were small cable companies all over the country laying cable. The idea of national cable provision evaporated when the big money, quick buck merchants moved into the market. What's that? A market ruined by speculators who's only interested in making a quick buck with no reinvestment? Surely not.

Anyway I always had my doubts about NTL entering the cable market. Just because they sold off their terrestrial broadcast arm I was never entirely convinced that allowing them into the cable market would be any better for the market than letting BT into it. Of course BT are barred, but NTL somehow managed to get in.

The whole broadband industry needs a overhaul

Both the wired and wireless broadband industry are in a mess. A large part of that mess is the telecoms infrastructure. I live in the middle of Swansea (OK it might not be sprawling urban metropolis but by the same token not a rural village on top of a mountain) and ADSL in my street is terrible. Not only are the speeds bad there is almost continual dropped connections. The street is cabled for Virgin so most people, like me, have moved to Virgin.

This is where the other problem with the industry comes - the mis-selling of broadband packages. I do get almost 2Meg out of my 2Meg VM BB so I can't really moan about that, but on my 'up to 8Meg' ADSL line I was lucky to get 1Meg, and if I did it wouldn't stay up for very long. If SWALEC said we provide up to 230V, but you were only getting 50V because of the infrastructure would people accept it in the same way they do with their BB.

Similarly with capping. Unlimited should mean just that. I have no problems with caps, but if a service is capped then say it is - not unlimited subject to FUP, and say it in big letters - not in some 4pt text in the corner, of the back page, on the separate document, after the passage in Swahili. Again what would happen if SWALEC said well you can have 240V untill you have used so many kWh then we will put your supply down to 50V?

* SWALEC - South Wales Electricity.

@Virgin Generosity

It's easy to get on these schemes; The same principle operates with mobile phone networks.

Phone up and tell them you're leaving. When you're put through to the "Retentions Department" (Shaft Division) tell them you want the new service at the cost to a new customer, or you're leaving. When they say no, hang up. Write to them to say you're leaving.

Around 2 days before the ACTUAL date you leave (contract expiration), you should get a call from some phone monkey^H^H^H^H^H^Hoperator who has reviewed your case, and wants to see what he can offer you. He will 9/10 get you the deal. After all the hassle, see if you can get out of the installation fee too.

You'd be amazed at just which handsets are available to you if you are a good customer. N.B, though; Good customers make them money, so lower tarrifs with a little over-spending is better than higher tarrifs without the "free" usage being used up.

O2 are brilliant

I have to say Virgin (sorry I mean rebranded NTL) are a useless bag of spanners. O2 on the other hand have excellent customer service and deliver what they say they can offer. I have been a customer of O2 now for the past 4 years and haevnt got a bad word to say about them in all that time..... Virgin, sorry, NTL on the other hand... nightmare.

@AC - Cable for New Builds

I could be wrong but I read that the cost of laying in the standard utilities is the responsibility of the developer. In exactly the same way that they have to pay for the roads, street lighting etc. they have to pay for the installation and connection of water, drains, electricity, etc. However cable was never added to that list of standard utilities so developers don't want to pay for it and the cable providers (OK Virgin) are reluctan to pay since the other utilities don't have to pay.

Or at least that's the way I read it.