I was going through my credit card bill yesterday, and found that they had charged my for a month after I’d switched to my new provider ….. so a phonecall was is order.

First customer service rep I talked to seemed to be helpful, put me on hold for a moment, and then the phone was picked up again, I was asked for my telephone number and hay presto – I was told that it wasn’t a Virgin Media Telephone number – well no, I was ringing up for an ADSL billing problem LoL – then she forced me to take down a number for their customer services – the one which I had already rung, and yes, she was telling me that I had to ring back…… not a happy bunny ….. I basically said that she was the second person I had talke to and that I’d like her to redirect my enquiry back to someone who can deal with an ADSL billing query…. hold music …. don’t you just hate hold musak?

So, finally I get through to someone, and they sem to be helpful, after asking why my “transaction date” had changed to the 27th in Feb instead of the 28th which it had been for ages, he said he didn’t know (no surprise there I guess), and I asked why they had taken a payment on the 28th Feb when I’d switched to my new provider on the 12th Feb, he said that it was basically because my contract billing date was the 26th of the month, and they’d therefore billing me until my end date of the 28th – great, ok, fine, contract is a contract, but then if that was the case then why was has the transaction date changed? dunno was the response….

And then, the greatest Virgin Media money maker (whilst customers are leaving them), are you reading closely? THEY DON’T REFUND UNLESS THE CUSTOMER SPECIFICALLY ASKS FOR IT. Yes, you heard me correctly, if YOU don’t ring them, THEY will not give you YOUR money back. I questioned this policy with them and he stated that they couldn’t do it as they didn’t know where the money should be paid back to as they wouldn’t know if a card was still valid or not – very odd, since they’d just TAKEN money from MY credit card, so they KNEW it was valid, and he also stated that if they took payment via Direct Debit that they couldn’t refund to a DD – why he was telling me this I’ll never know, but he seemed to need to tell me even though I’d only EVER paid by credit card, and therefore a refund was never an issue to them. Also if giving a refund was such a minefield – wy didn’t they try making contact with myself and find out where I would like MY money refunded to? He said it wasn’t their policy to do so, and it was up to the customer to contact them to gain their refund.

I told him to refund onto the card and also told him that I was VERY glad to have moved away from Virgin Media, I mean, they have kept hold of money that hould hae been refunded to me for over a month, and think about how many other people may be in the same situation as me currently, and how many of them do you think will know that they have to contact them in order to gain the refund that they are entitled to? not many, and so Virgin Media are able to stash this cash and earn interest from it, but of course when you get a refund you don’t get the interest on the money you are owed as well, so as far as Virgin Media goes, it’s a win win situation for them.

Thankfully, I’m away from Virgin Media now, and am very glad, my own company is now supplying a great service to myself, and I will soon be launching this service to the general public, at a good price, for a good service and a good transfer limit with a HUGE off-peak usage as well. Keep reading, or indeed subscribe to the feed in order to find out more when it launches

-Roamer

After balling about them back in October about their worse than useless latency and bandwidth, I’ve done lots of research into other providers.  PlusNet were one of the front runners, but one of my friends has since been having problems with latency of VOIP across their network resulting in >1 second delays etc, so I had to put them to one side.  I searched alot, and read huge amounts of peoples comments, reviews, babblings etc and after cutting the wheat from the chaff I think I’ve stumbled upon the solution which will work best for me.

The solution is that I have found a wholesale internet provider, one who gives good support, who keep there outbound link bandwidth in line with their customer base so that you don’t find yourself being severely bottle-necked during the so-called “Busy” evening periods, and also doesn’t require a long contract term – in fact, nothing more than a 30 day notice, no hidden charges, no migration fees – pretty much the ideal provider – apart from one thing, you can’t, as a normal customer, go up to them and open an account, migrate your service and be happy, thats because they are a wholesale internet provider, meaning that they only deal with companies, companies who’s aim is to sell their service onto end consumers like you or I…..

So, after discussions with people behind the scenes here @Roamer.com I decided that my company would endeavour to register as a partner with the wholesale internet provider, and so we have, now we are waiting until 23:43 on the 12th of Feb to see that our service does indeed go live as stated, and that the service is all it’s cracked up to be.

Once we have made sure that we are indeed happy, and that there are no pitfalls I haven’t yet seen, I will then be releasing an ADSL service to the general public, one which provides very fair packages and fair prices, and gives a quality service to all customers – but more about that as it happens in the future

If you would possibly be interested in a new reliable service – especially you Virgin Media ADSL customers out there, please join the site and leave a comment, I’ll then be able to update you when the service goes live for all.

I’ll post a follow up to this article as soon as I’ve been able to connect with my new adsl details, here’s hoping

-Roamer.

Why, you ask, wouldn’t I recommend them, I do this on two counts:

1. The provide telephone support on an 0906 number which costs 25 pence per minute!
2. Their network latency is awful (So are their transfer speeds, but this is secondary to the latency from my point of view).

Now the support number problem I don’t see as an issue to myself, as I much prefer to use their live chat system (If you can get hold of someone of course), but the latency problem is terrible…

Virgin Media ADSL customers connect to their network through a number of  points, known as bams, and most of these this morning at around 11am were already mostly showing terrible latency, and I have collected the ping times from a number of trace routes done whilst trying to connect to most (If not all) of Virgin Media’s bams, these are show below.

2   237 ms   217 ms   227 ms  brhm-bam-1.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.5]
2   228 ms   226 ms   253 ms  brhm-bam-2.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.3]

2   173 ms   157 ms   159 ms  brnt-bam-2.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.7]
2   238 ms   240 ms   236 ms  brnt-bam-3.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.170]

2   203 ms   206 ms   209 ms  glfd-bam-1.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.4]

2   218 ms   227 ms   370 ms  leed-bam-1.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.68]

2   166 ms   174 ms   169 ms  manc-bam-2.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.19]

3    35 ms    33 ms    29 ms  nrth-t2core-a-ge-wan63.inet.ntl.com [213.106.255.61]

2   209 ms   182 ms   189 ms  popl-bam-1.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.76]

2    48 ms    45 ms    42 ms  winn-bam-1.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.190]
As you can see, all bar two of them are showing over 100ms, and about half of them are over 200ms – this is unacceptable to alot of users out there, especially the online gamers and anyone using a VOIP service – this can induce a delay in the VOIP service which makes it almost unusable apparently.

It seems as if Virgin Media have too many customers connecting through there bams and that their equipment cannot take the load in an acceptable way, thus inducing the high latency show here, and also a slow down in transfer rates – not an acceptable service in my opinion.

Just to close, I was able to get connected through different bams by disconnecting and reconnecting the PVC connection – which gives you a chance to connect to a different bam from the one you were connected to – although this isn’t a certainty, then testing the connection my running a “tracert www.google.com” and seeing what the second hope ping times are, once a low latency connection is found.

I would suggest this above to any Virgin Media ADSL users who are experiencing high latency or low transfer speeds, although remember, you are disconnecting the PVC and not the actual ADSL (ATM) connection – disconnecting and reconnecting your ADSL connection can have an adverse effect on your service as the exchange equipment will see the constant disconnects and reconnects as a possible line fault and may take steps to stop this which may in their own right slow your connection down (Such as dropping your IP Profile or raising your SNR thus lowering your Sync speed).

I hope this helps some Virgin Media users out there, and I am currently looking into some other ADSL providers and will be providing some updates here as and when I’ve got some new information for you all.

-Roamer.