News - Virgin Media forced to drop “unlimited” broadband ad claim

[benegerton1985]

Just about to switch over from Virgin to Sky Fibre in the next couple of weeks.

Virgin are complete and utter idiots. Forcing me to ring an 0845 number (call lasted 45minutes) to cancel and asked why I was leaving by the RUDEST telephone customer service person I have ever dealt with.

[3dcandy]

You should try the CSA. Sexist arrogant rude women make every other customer "service" experience enjoyable. I complained and got passed onto a female manager who was unbelievable. Got her name and reported her to my MP. Got an email back from my female MP saying she couldn't believe how bad they were and she was making formal complaints...
Anyway, off topic completely, Sky don't throttle or anything, but network useage is getting high meaning slowdowns. They will eventually struggle like Virgin unless they can make some huge investments in capacity. Still seem best out there at moment for me though, and at £7.50 a month plus line rental a steal. I get 19 meg down and 1 meg up too

[peterb]

Can I remind members to read this please. I have edited some posts.

http://forums.hexus.net/faq.php?faq=...q_hex_swearing

[crossy]

"Unlimited", that's a word that gets abused far to often. Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett also stated back in 2008 that Net Neutrality is -----. This company are the enemy. Avoid them.

Can't see how you can justify VM as "the enemy" - while they've got less than brilliant support etc at least they do fulfil the invaluable function of keeping the pressure on BT. Strangely enough I think in this respect they're very similar to Three - another company that's pretty good on data provision yet has "customer support" that tends to make folks either cry or want to go on a killing spree. (ex Three customer). And are they honestly any worse than other company - although from their reputation Talk Talk seem to be worst.

Never that impressed with the ASA at the best of times - seems like the kind of sleepy bureaucracy that's easy to poke fun at. And in this respect I think the best, and certainly, fairest would be to ban everyone from using the word "unlimited" in their advertising, since ALL broadband is limited:

• Capacity limits - get to that GB/month and suddenly lose your connection (BT et al)
• Throttling when you hit that magic limit (VM)
• Physical limits - surely there's no company that has enough capacity to give you even 90% of the stated speed 100% of the time. Certainly not for the kind of costs that I could afford!

I couldn't live the with capacity limited provision - I've tried that with my phone and it becomes a real chore to "ration" yourself. Plus the fact that I also have to use my b/b for to dial in for work (teleworker) makes that a non starter.

Throttling - to me at least - seems fair ... hit the network hard and we slow you down so other folks get a shot. And I'll give props to VM in that their throttling is limited to a couple of hours and then you're back to normal. Talking to a friend in the US and he was saying that his ISP applies a throttle for the rest of the billing period. Ouch!

As as to Burke-faces comments about the lack of net neutrality - that's probably right. I WANT my VOIP calls to be prioritised over someone's CoD session, and in turn they deserve to be prioritised over someones download, or worse still, torrent use. That's the only time I'm going to agree with NB - in other respects the guy had a poor grasp of reality.

[RhinoUK]

Im a virgin customer and agree if it has limits then its not unlimited but i dont think its just Virgin thats doing misleading adverts. All of them are as bad as each other in their advertising but at the emd of the day there service is better than most others but that doesnt make it ok to mislead people, you just have to know what your signing upto and if you read the small print it tells you about such things.

[McEwin]

Sky don't throttle or anything, but network useage is getting high meaning slowdowns. They will eventually struggle like Virgin unless they can make some huge investments in capacity.

As a Be Unlimited user that fills me with dread having just been bought out by sky....

[Raz316]

I can imagine ISP's being sat round a table at a primary school and the teacher asking them to describe their service without using the word unlimited and all of them struggling.

All companies are the same though, I don't get why they can't just leave the word alone. When I was setting up a phone contract with T-Mobile I said I wanted data to be unlimited.

"Oh it is unlimited... up to 2Gb"
"But no, that's not unlimited"
"The first 2Gb is unlimited"
"And after that..?"
"after that the service slows as you use more data"
"so it is limited?"
"....well yes"

[ZaO]

Can I remind members to read this please. I have edited some posts.

http://forums.hexus.net/faq.php?faq=...q_hex_swearing

Just wondering if I broke this rule? - "Many unacceptable words are in the swear filter anyway, and so will not appear on the forum if used anyway. But if people star out parts of words, we WILL construe that as a deliberate attempt to bypass both our rules and our intent, and will deal with it in that light. If you have to star out a word or any letters in it, then you should not be saying it. Find another way to express yourself."

I didn't consider the word I starred out to be any worse than "crappy", which was said to be ok. I was also quoting a statement so didn't want to alter it too much for accuracy reasons. I haven't received a message about it though so I assume it's ok? Interested to know if it's allowed now... Edit: Oh scratch that. I re-read what you said and went back to check my post and you changed that word. My bad

Also - "Unauthorised advertising is expressly prohibited. This applies not only to advertising by commercial organisations, but to individuals “pimping” their own websites."

Is the link to my Soundcloud page in my signature ok?

Thanks.

Can't see how you can justify VM as "the enemy" - while they've got less than brilliant support etc at least they do fulfil the invaluable function of keeping the pressure on BT. Strangely enough I think in this respect they're very similar to Three - another company that's pretty good on data provision yet has "customer support" that tends to make folks either cry or want to go on a killing spree. (ex Three customer). And are they honestly any worse than other company - although from their reputation Talk Talk seem to be worst.

Never that impressed with the ASA at the best of times - seems like the kind of sleepy bureaucracy that's easy to poke fun at. And in this respect I think the best, and certainly, fairest would be to ban everyone from using the word "unlimited" in their advertising, since ALL broadband is limited:

• Capacity limits - get to that GB/month and suddenly lose your connection (BT et al)
• Throttling when you hit that magic limit (VM)
• Physical limits - surely there's no company that has enough capacity to give you even 90% of the stated speed 100% of the time. Certainly not for the kind of costs that I could afford!

I couldn't live the with capacity limited provision - I've tried that with my phone and it becomes a real chore to "ration" yourself. Plus the fact that I also have to use my b/b for to dial in for work (teleworker) makes that a non starter.

Throttling - to me at least - seems fair ... hit the network hard and we slow you down so other folks get a shot. And I'll give props to VM in that their throttling is limited to a couple of hours and then you're back to normal. Talking to a friend in the US and he was saying that his ISP applies a throttle for the rest of the billing period. Ouch!

As as to Burke-faces comments about the lack of net neutrality - that's probably right. I WANT my VOIP calls to be prioritised over someone's CoD session, and in turn they deserve to be prioritised over someones download, or worse still, torrent use. That's the only time I'm going to agree with NB - in other respects the guy had a poor grasp of reality.

I definitely agree that they should be a lot clearer about stuff. "Unlimited" has a strong, clearly definied meaning. And you can't mess with that. They've literally lied to you to sell you something and somehow they get away with it almost all the time. You try pulling something like that on them like telling them they've lied about their service so you're not going to pay them the full amount, and you'll have debt collectors after you in no time!

[3dcandy]

As a Be Unlimited user that fills me with dread having just been bought out by sky....

Necessary evil, internet useage in general is rocketing, you have to balance the investment. To be fair, so far Sky seem to have managed to do it much better than Virgin did when they were struggling - although I'm still hearing plenty of horror stories from mates where they have a service that crawls and the date for upgrades keeps getting put back and back, and that's with ALL the IPS's out there...