Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech Fu#k Virgin media

I have been waiting since Thursday for my tv/phone/bb and i just rang them back and spent 20mins on hold to be told i can not have any of there services!!!

the people across the road have it as well as many other people in the road. im SO dam p!ssed off right now. i need the net for the laptop/home pc/Xbox.

now I cant do sh!t and the subscriptions that i pay for online like Xbox live are useless.

Can anyone suggest another service provider to me please.

Dont bother with Sky either, they are pretty useless.

Tiscali have always been the best, most reliable BB supplier for me, my family, friends and colleagues. Noone i know has ever had a problem with the service.

Everyone i know with Sky BB has experienced problems with the TV and the Internet, Including myself.

I think the site www.broadbandreview.co.uk might be helpful to you.

just tried http://www.broadbandreview.co.uk/ but got no were.

i think witt Tiscali i need to have a current internet conection with someone else. or have a BT landline (i dont)

am with virgin media and have been since the days of blueyonder - never had any real problem at all... however, if i was to change ISP for wotever reason Tiscali is one i would def consider.

a few ppl have mention Be broadband as well, cant get them up here but can at my old address. www.bethere.co.uk/

wow thats a great ISP.

I just phoned BT and they want £125 installation charge of a phone line. gutted.

I need all 3 services tho Phone/BB.TV so i want to go with SKY to make it easy but everyone says the BB is cr@p. and I need a good one for Online Gaming so it needs to be 100% reliable.(i hate lag)

Just aslong as you know, I have had nothing but problems with Sky, with the internet cutting out every 10 mins sometimes. The internet not working at all other times. I am usually without a connection around 90% of the time (although it seems to be a bit better recently)

Sky broadband would also require a telephone line.

we are with sky for tv, bt for fone and vm for broadband, have tried the package deals but there is always something that isn't so good

Take a look in the Sky Broadband thread matey, AX is the only person seemingly having problems with it.

There is at least 5 other users, including myself, who have admitted that since they got the bb, its been rock solid. To be fair, every single company has unhappy customers, and the amount of time AX has been having problems, tbh either there is a major fault on the line/DSLAM connection which is nout to do with Sky, or he simply hasnt been reporting the faults/exaggerating his claims, because if all our services were that bad, do you really think Sky would have gained nearly 1 million customers in just 14 months (look at what happening with TalkTalk for instance)?

Customers like myself require internet access to make a living, my computer is connected most of the day and night, if the Sky was crap, I would be the first person to leave them and go elsewhere, believe me.

My installation and activation was hassle free, the majority of people I have referred to Sky have also had the same experience, with the exception on one, being AX. Outside of Wiki, most of my family are now on Sky Broadband, they all turn to me for technology advice and I am the one who explained the cost benefits of Sky BB to them.

I dont game, so I simply can't comment on its gaming performance, I dont know if anyone else on this site uses it for gaming, maybe there is someone and can comment on its performance??

Personally I have been happy with Sky... im not so happy with my Sky+ box atm, which I have said on more then one occasion, but to be fair to it, its a 4yr old PVR2, which is used every single day, and I turn the power off to it of a night, which does cause premature mechanical breakdown.

Its not actually broken as such, its more a case of sometimes it can record dodgy, whereas it was fine for the first 3 years or so.

Having said that though, it's more due to my sheer laziness that Ihavent screwed a new PVR3 out of them yet, and its got to the point now where, because in the future they will be launching an IPTV on-demand service for customers with SkyHD boxes to begin with, followed by new compatible Sky+ boxes (if the manufacturing cost of the SkyHD boxes doesnt seriously come down), that I am now considering cutting my losses and getting SkyHD with a nice 300GB hard drive (not interested in the HD tbh, just the bigger storage space, Sky Anytime and the IPTV On Demand service)...

2 people I work with have the same problem as AX, they randomly lose their connection willy nilly and it can takes ages to re-connect. I prefer alway connected Fibre optic Cable broadband, Who offers that? lol

Don't all ISP's but VM require you to be connected to a BT exchange something that BT quoted you £125 to do.

My opinion stick with VM, but complain complain complain, You can get a lot of freebies/offers out of them. Freind in work phoned up and threatened to go to Talk Talk as it was cheaper and was upto 8mb broadband although he knows its only 1.7mb in his street, They gave him a XL broadband which is 10mb soon to be 20mb (if it isnt allready) for the price of M broadband for 12 months and free phone calls anytime for 12months, but he had to sign a new 12month contract, which seems to be standard policy with VM at the minute.

But dont go wireless.

Tell us some more jokes lol. The amount of times I have, over the years, esepcially during my time as a mod on nthellworld.com working in the interest of ntl, heard people bang on about this "state of the art fibre optical network" its laughable.

Check the connection that goes into your modem.... is it fibre optic?? No, not unless you live in Dolphin Sqaure, because FTTH isnt available in this country and probably wont be for a long long long time.

In fact, its not even HFC, nver mind FTTH. So forget all this shite you have heard about fibre optic networks, Easynet (Sky Broadband) have a much bigger "fibre optic network" then Virgin will ever have, in the form or tier 1 IP transit and carrier backbones

So if people want to argue this "fibre optic" shit in the case of Virgin, go ahead, but Sky already has one over in the form of real international backbones and carriers, OC24 anyone??

I now gets a vision of the cable man with a piece of co-ax in hand, telling a noob customer "well its our state of the art fibre network that delivers all these channels".

So did NTL own NTHELLWORLD then?

I know that from the brown box to the modem is co-ax but do VM not use fibre optics to send the signal from their end to the little brown box outside you house then? and isnt this what helps keeps the constant connection speed? this is a serious question Matty, Im not being sarcastic.

Was I atleast correct with this stament:

Not all ISP's require you to have a phoneline no. Also, AOL can provide services over the cable network without a phoneline, although they dont like to do it (they have a long standing agreement wth NTL and Telewest to do so).

All forms of DSL require a phoneline - Dont for one minute believe that because DSL is over phonelines, it is way outdated technology, in tests VDSL2 has outperformed DOCSIS 3.0 cable and is coming to market way faster (dont even think Virgin will get DOCSIS 3.0 anytime soon, they can't even afford to convert the network to DOCSIS 2.0).

Aye, NTL unfortunatly bought nthellworld.com, I was already a mod on there, when they bought it, they shut it down about a year later, being the snidey pricks they are, they said they were building a replacement namely NTL Community, but it never came, much like the rest of the promises they make that never, or take years longer to come to frutation.

Whelan has your house ever had a phoneline? If so, it wont be £125, its only that price if they need to do a new install.

With regards to the network, its a 20year old network that has seen very little in the form of investment or upgrades etc since it was built by the likes of Mercury, Bell Cablemedia and Cabletel, and the technologies that make it (DOCSIS 1.1, euroDOCSIS and DAVIC - yes its a mish mash of technologies, one of the reasons why some area's have better and more advanced services then others) are well well behind the times. True, its fibre optic until it hits the UBR, but your only as fast as you weakest link, and your weakest link is co-ax, which surprisingly is pretty much the same as BT's phonelines.

At least DSL can handle uploads without struggling, a small number of users on a single UBR all maxxing out their upload at the same time can kill the download for every single user on that UBR. Thats why the contention ratio on cable is so low at only 20:1, because they are shit scared of multiple users maxxing their upload and causing problems.

http://www.reviewcentre.com/r107118_2_Sky_Broadband.html

I know at least 5 people with the same problems as me. Migrating away from previous reliable ISP's to a very unreliable service from Sky.

I even know one girl that was mis-sold the service similar to myself, she was told she could have the 3 for £26 but was actually put on the £50 odd per month service.

Just because they took on 1 million customers, it doesn't mean they are a good ISP.

My mother ended up leaving TalkTalk after 3 months because they didn't supply her with anything, but had her paying full price.

One good thing about Sky's technical service, at least they are english speaking. So i am getting no-where speaking to an english person rather than a call centre in the middle east.

Well pretty much everyone I know who is using Sky, is happy with the service, as I say, except for yourself.

Being placed on a £50 per month service, when even using the connect service it would only be £38.00 per month is also bollocks... either she is a noob and added summit like Sky Movies and/or Sky Sports and is only able to get the connect service, or she basically got Sky World and either the the max broadband speed or the mid with the higher tier phone service.

People always get talked into things by sales reps, you will be amazed at how easily people give in when sales reps suggest they should take x deal instead of y, because x is better for whatever reasons, when really they only actually wanted y.

Again, any large company such as Sky WILL undoubtedly have some unhappy customers... you show me a company on the ssame scale that doesnt? Im not being funny, but Tiscali have a terrible reputation within the ISP industry, again, like many other large ISP's.

I suppose I like to be with an ISP is going to be around tomorrow, the state Tiscali have been in financially over the last few years (they have been days away from going bankrupt on more then one occasion), theres no guarantee they will even be able to provide your service tomorrow.

Through any problems that Sky and other ISP's are having, including cable, at least there is very little chance of them going bankrupt next week.

As for TalkTalk, imho, they should be banned from advertising and have their sales call centre shut down by trading standards, because they are taking on even more customers, yet as you say, they can't even provide a service to the ones they have full stop.

They were told they could have the deal for £26 a month and decided to have the movies and Sky Sports. Which should of took them to about £43 a month. But it looks as though they had the exact same problem as I did where they were told they could have the £26 deal, but it was unavailable.

Luckily, like myself, it looks as though after numerous calls they are getting it for 40 odd a month.

I really do hope my Broadband gets more reliable.

Yeah, My mum just cancelled her connection with talktalk and they tried to charge her 3 months line rental and a cancellation charge. When she phoned them up, she got passed through several people, when she eventually got through to an english speaking person, they hung up. Sounds as though she is having a real nightmare.