Virgin Broadband
Installation

My first foray into the cable world of broadband will be my last, until someone buys out Virgin.

I moved into a cable property on 18th August. Having paid for installation up front for Virigin 50MB broadband, I was given an installation date of 17th Sept. I thought that this was bloody terrible, frankly, but was told that they were oversubscribed. So I waited for 17th Sept.

On 17th Sept, I waited in all day. At the end of the day, I phoned to see where my engineer was. I was told that I needed to have the cable installed up to the house as well as the technician for the broadband and so they'd changed the installation date. Without telling me. When I mentioned this, they claimed to have tried to leave a message on my mobile number. This was an outright lie. Anyone with a mobile knows that if you are not able to answer the call for any reason, it goes to voice mail. This is one of life's few guarantees. No vm = no Virgin contact.

So the new date was 30th Sept.

I confirmed on 29th Sept. that they were coming. They were.

At 1pm on 30th, a van pulled up and 2 very kind and professional gentlemen laid the cable up to the house and tested the cable. They did a fantastic job and confirmed that everything was ready for my technician. As they weren't connected services, they didn't know when the technician would be coming, but said that everything was ready for him when he turned up.

At 6pm, I phoned Virgin. No technician had been booked. I pointed out that this was the second time I had been screwed over by them. They apologised and then gave me a new installation date of 21st October.

The 21st of October. Over 2 months after I'd signed up, and THREE WEEKS after their latest screwup.

I told them to just send me the cable modem and I'd install it myself. Nope. Can't do that. Needs a technician to perform a 5 minute task. A 5 minute task which would have to wait 3 weeks.

I cancelled the service. My standard 6MB broadband arrives in 3 days' time. It isn't 50MB, but more importantly, I'll have broadband this side of Christmas.