The Virgin Media Thread

My box freeze-ups usually occur between mid afternoon and late evening. It's happened during Doctor Who before. It seems to only affect the picture and the sound, the box's interface still works, so it must be a problem at Virgin's end, one assumes.

We've had the TV and Internet go on two occasions recently. Virgin were adamant that the fault was at our end.

Which is why on both occasions there was a Virgin van at the junction box several hours later, of course.

"There isn't a fault in your area" seems to equate to "nobody else has reported it, it must be your equipment" in VM Tech Support's language.

Yep - and on both occasions I've had to ring back and cancel the booked engineer visit.

The services went down one Sunday at noon - however, I walk past the junction box on my way home from work. At 11pm that night, I walk past this box to see a Virgin man playing with it. I have a chat to him about it and it turns out he was only called out to investigate a fault in our area an hour previous.

The On Demand and Hard Disk recording systems both outperform Sky's offerings by a country mile and I can live without one or two basic Sky channels. The broadband I am rarely able to fault.

But the customer service is atrocious.

Absolutely. I really wish they'd train their tech people to know when they're out of their depth and pass the call on to a real techie rather than wasting everybody's time with the scripts.

No matter how many times I explain what I have already tried, they insist I unplug and replug in everything as if that's the magic answer to everything.

Really hacks me off that my intelligence is insulted so badly.

I have to agree with you about CS, especially since adding an Indian call centre to their company.

I don't think the fact that the call centre is in India is the real problem - the problem is that the call centre is staffed with people who are undertrained and over confident in their (lacking) abilities and knowledge.

Wherever you put the call centre, if you staff it with the wrong people you're going to end up providing a crap service.

I've noticed something unusual about music on demand. I was downgraded during my holiday to save money, so I was on M telly. Playing around in music on demand the first song that caught my eye was Madonna's 4 minutes (costing 20p).

Oddly, now back on XL with the free music OD, that song is nowhere to be found. Can anyone not on XL confirm I did infact see this on the list? And if so, why can't I access it now despite being on XL?

Its not there on M now.

Whilst we're on the subject - I do like the names Medium, Large, Extra Large. Much better than whatever they were before.

After 7 years my old Pace 1000 STB finally packed in last week, luckily we phoned Virgin on Saturday, and they came around this morning, and I've been given a Samsung VBox (with VBox and Virgin Media logos on the box) and I must say I am impressed, it's alot smaller, it's alot faster when changing channels, going through the EPG's and much smoother on interactive features and VOD too, why couldn't have we had this sooner?

Although I still have my Cable & Wireless Digital Viewing card mind.