News - Virgin Media posts bumper revenues in 2010

[HEXUS]

Broadband and mobile divisions help bring home the bacon.

Read more.

[crossy]

I'm really glad that VM appear to be doing better - I think they're needed as a way to keep Sky "honest" - but maybe it'd be a good time to remind them that "investing" in their broadband network would please a lot of their customers.

Although, if I'm making requests, I wouldn't mind having some way to watch Gameface/Ginx files again - it was nice to have a "fix" of game discussion on a Sunday morning.

Oh, and offering me a reasonable price to upgrade my broadband (i.e. the same as the price difference quoted to new customers on their website) would also go down real well - I fancy moving from 10Mb to 30Mb.

[MonkeyL]

I'm really glad that VM appear to be doing better - I think they're needed as a way to keep Sky "honest"

But who's going to keep Virgin honest, because in my experience they don't know the meaning of the word.

[Hicks12]

They should reduce the price of our bill then... im just feeling more annoyed with them selling off channels and then sky saying" oh we will cancel these now, thanks" , seems silly for VM to just get rid of their channels to the competition without asking for a clause like they cant close it .

[Andeh13]

Crossy - your mad, you have clearly never had to use their customer service before!

I despise them with a passion, run by a bunch of incompetent semi-coherant zoo escapees. Their technical support team is clearly trained by uneducated children and their customer service team just seem to be able to achieve impossible heights of sheer stupidity on a daily basis. Aside from that I am sure they have souls & a conscience ...they just hide it very well!

[crossy]

Crossy - your mad, you have clearly never had to use their customer service before!

I despise them with a passion, run by a bunch of incompetent semi-coherant zoo escapees. Their technical support team is clearly trained by uneducated children and their customer service team just seem to be able to achieve impossible heights of sheer stupidity on a daily basis. Aside from that I am sure they have souls & a conscience ...they just hide it very well!

No, I've had the "pleasure" of dealing with Testicle Support and Customer Dis-service - along with an long, long talk with the Sucker, sorry "Customer", Retention team. Thank the maker that my broadband connection is reliable...

Actually, if you time it right you can get a real, live human being on CS - they screwed up my billing two months ago, and not only did I get it sorted, but got an apology to boot. Plus the lass I was speaking to (Lancashire accent, not Lahore) sounded kinda cute (it'd been a long day at work)

I'm no apologist for VM, but if you want real pain and incompetence you really want to try Three's support. I would willingly pay up to £150 to break my current contract, just so I could tell them exactly where they can stick their SIM, their sh*tty text service, their beyond-sh*tty billing and the halfwit zombies that seem to stock most of their Customer Insult department. (I've tried to find out how much to buyout the contract but, surprise, surprise, that doesn't figure on their scripts!) Roll on June 2012 ...

But who's going to keep Virgin honest, because in my experience they don't know the meaning of the word.

Abject apologies for using the words "Sky" and "honest" in the same sentence...

They should reduce the price of our bill then... im just feeling more annoyed with them selling off channels and then sky saying" oh we will cancel these now, thanks"

Agreed, didn't I already say something about wanting to see Gameface and Ginx Files? Actually I wouldn't mind being able to see Leverage too. I've got to wonder why in the name of Sydney Opera House did Sky take over Virgin One, Bravo, etc just to close most of them - maybe the Competition Commission should be looking at this?

[Jonatron]

Their profits must be so big because I pay to have 25% packet loss, 500ms ping on a "20Mb fibre optic" connection and won't have it fixed till May.

[Percy1983]

Oddly I am looking at moving to Virgin, saying that I am moving from talk talk...

So upgrade CS it is.

[rabbid]

But who's going to keep Virgin honest, because in my experience they don't know the meaning of the word.

quite, honest or open or transparent are terms that can never be applied to them

after 4 months they have grudgingly released guide figures for their whole detrimental usage letter fiasco:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...our/m-p/102590
locked after deleting many pages of posts

then this:
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...ad/td-p/247501

now rolling out 100Mb when they cant even cope with 10, 20 and certainly not 50...

[oolon]

I got a classic mailer to my house yesterday.

First it was address to someone who previously lived here explaning that the street was already setup for cable and did they want to sign up... Ok on the face of it nothing special, they just have an old list... however.

1) I tried to move my services to this address, so they know who actually lives there.
2) They failed to do the install in the street as they could not pull the cable through through to the box, so we could not get cable!

Frankly unless they write to me, and say they have fixed the problems in the street I can be bothered wasting my time with them. They would also having to buy me out of my existing contracts, I have with Be*.

[jnutt]

Well I've been a Virgin user since they cabled up our street many years ago. The service has always been good. I've had a couple of outages on e-mail which were major ie down for a week but apart from that I can't complain. We use the whole package V+ telly, VMobile, home phone, and 50mb broadband. Average speeds seem to be 42 to 46 mb so I can't complain at all.

[stroberaver]

Crossy - your mad, you have clearly never had to use their customer service before!

I despise them with a passion, run by a bunch of incompetent semi-coherant zoo escapees. Their technical support team is clearly trained by uneducated children and their customer service team just seem to be able to achieve impossible heights of sheer stupidity on a daily basis.

Seconded. The way VM treats it's customers and manages it's network & infrastructure leaves them filed under "C" for "cowboys". Or maybe another word beginning with "c"....

I'd strongly recommend anyone to think twice before signing up with them, so that nobody else has to go through the pain I've been through for the past few months (all is well currently, but only after months of no service, hours and hours wasted, and increasingly bitter complaints to external bodies).

VM appear to be overselling on a serious scale - willfully signing people up to services they knowingly can't provide in some of their oversubscribed areas. And yet, in my dealings with the CEO's office when I pointed out that the utilisation thresholds at which network upgrades are triggered are clearly way too high as it leaves customers without service when it grinds to a halt for a few months, their response was that it was not financially viable to upgrade areas until they are absolutely sure it's necessary.

Revenues up by nearly 6%, and it's not financially viable to ensure people get a useable broadband service? Cowboys...

[crossy]

Interesting selection of posts on this topic - it'd be nice if the grande gorgonzola's (i.e. sweaty and smelly) at VM were reading this, but I'm sure that they're too busy counting their bonuses on some Caribbean island...

Getting back to the posts - here's the VM problem - their technical service delivery (i.e. not customer/technical support) is too damned patchy. It seems (to me at least) that where you were original a BlueYonder customer then it's more likely that you're going to have a more pleasant experience. On the other hand if you were an NThelL victim then prepare for angst and disappointment. They (VM) have also spent far too long relying on the spare capacity that they had in the network - although again some areas are better than others.

What to spend their "bumper revenues" on?

1. Bring technical support back in-house, and bring it back to the UK. If you're driven (by frustration) to call the VM operator a "crack-addled, cack-filled, half-witted spawn of an illiterate prostitute and the village idiot" it's so much more satisfying if the recipient understands more than English 101.
(apologies for the epithet stream - but Three are annoying me again)

2. Invest (more?) in the network. Just think of the PR value if you could deliver consistent speed close-to-advertised to all your customers. At the moment some customers (like me) get our headline speeds most of the time, others appear to be lucky to get 10% of that.

3. Forget about TV. VM's TV offerings have always sucked - and selling the channels to the Delboys at Sky has made this worse. Just leave the TV offering as it is and concentrate where you're strong - broadband and (according to the article anyway) mobile. And for the great makers sake - forget ... about ... 3D ... TV !!!!

4. Start rewarding the current customers - I'm not talking about handing out £5 notes (although that'd be nice). Merely (a) make sure that existing customers are actually told what new products are available; and (b) make sure that existing customers are not penalised for that - you should be encouraging customers to upgrade (and spend a bit more money), not discouraging it (last time I checked it'd cost me three times what a new customer would be charged to upgrade my broadband).