[Sigma]

To me, over the years it went from pretty poor, to very good (back when the support newsgroups were still available and the call centres were all UK-based), to utter crap.

A few months ago VM had routing issues. I phoned them up and allowed a support guy to remotely access my PC, as he was insistent that it was my settings that were to blame. He tinkered about with IE, resetting the browser and tinkering with plug-ins, despite me telling him that I use Opera as my default browser. When he realised that he was getting nowhere, he told me that "Google is having server issues and they host the sites that you currently can't access. It will be fixed in 24 hours, but call back if it's not". This was obviously a lie in order to just get me off the phone. I phoned back the next day and got through to someone in the UK and they actually knew what I was talking about when I said "routing issues" and the issue was reported and fixed a couple of days later.

A couple of weeks ago, my broadband went down. It wasn't back on after a couple of hours so I dialled 150. I was on hold for 70 minutes, nobody answered, so I gave up.

The other day I noticed that a couple of channels were missing on my TV and were throwing up 3202 error pages. Today I phoned VM to try and get this sorted and I was on hold for 32 minutes before I gave up waiting.

Since June 25th I've had intermittent issues with receiving email. There is a long thread that I started on the official VM forums about this and lots of other customers are affected, but for a couple of weeks they tried to fob everyone off saying it was their settings, then they opened a ticket but didn't reply to the thread for 2-3 weeks, despite people asking for updates and getting very frustrated. Then the ticket was closed and we were all told that no issues had been found, despite people continuing to post about them. People started complaining to the CEO and another ticket was opened, but the issue still hasn't been resolved and it's been 10 weeks since it was originally reported.

When the VM support newsgroup was available, you could get a fast response from someone who clearly knew what they were talking about. When the call centres were UK-based, I would rarely get through to someone that was clueless. VM have not only cut costs by using call centres based outside the UK, but they have cut costs even further by not training the staff that man them properly. Also, it appears that in recent weeks, either the number of support calls being made to VM has shot up massively, or they have made a lot of staff redundant, because I have never waited on hold so long for someone to answer the phone with any other company.

I need a fast broadband connection and unfortunately, Virgin are currently the only company in my area that can offer one. If that wasn't the case, I'd have left ages ago.