Internet Providers, Wallet buggery

3volv3d

Posts: 626   +420
Coming from the UK, land of the wallet rapist, I wanted to just, have a little rant. I am trying to cable cut. Cheapen bills, Amazon fire TV with prime and plex is more than enough, but you need internet and I just hate all of the providers. Their business models are just so out of date and out of touch.

Company of target. The highly useless and incompetent Virgin Media.

But frankly this goes out to all those internet providers out there. They suck. They are wallet rapists and nothing more.

I have never had a problem with Virgin, having been with them for 10 years or so. Always got the speeds I paid for. But, I still feel ripped off, and more so lately after they made a bit of a F' up with an upgrade, and showed how rubbish they were at sorting it out.

Cellular Phone companies, charge say £35 - £50 a month for phone and tariff, only to get to the end of your 2 year contract, phone bought and paid for and continue to charge you for phone and tariff. Only in the last couple of years, have phone companies changed this, and stopped taking the extra £240 or so every year.

Internet Providers, have always similarly screwed their customers over, by offering x amount of speed for x amount of £'s, over a 3 tier system, M , L and XL broadband speed packages. And it was like £15, £25, £35 say. So you pay for XL, you are paying £35, and you are getting 10mb for example.
They roll out new services, and new speeds. Now somewhere along the line, you end up paying £35 for L because XL is now £50.

Personally at one point I was paying £50 I believe for 100megs. It was overkill really, I didn't need it I talked about dropping to a lower tariff. I was told go to 30 meg (options were 30/60/100 I think), as the 30 would go to 50 or 60 automatically, next upgrade. I dropped to 30meg. The speeds changed on the site, the prices were the same ish, I however did not get put to 50meg, as I am sure many didn't. I even told them what was agreed, what happened, they didn't change a thing, they didn't care. So for ages, I am paying for a speed that doesn't even exist. Til I had enough of being overcharged and no one listening to me.

So I convince them to give me 100meg, for the price of the 50meg line. Which felt like a bit of a win. And then they screw up. Either they didn't activate the router properly, or its broken. I ring tech support. I have 30 and 100 megs on my account. For 1 month I have issues because they can't clear one of the packages off the system. I have rung numerous times, they all say it is this, and yet they can't remove it. Until one guy says, I can do that from here, why didn't they just delete it here and start again... Maybe because you are all trained by 300 muppets ? Speeds get better then drop again, they are so intermittent. It is either the router or they haven't activated it when they reset everything. I complain more, no one knows what the problem is, the old turn it off and on, and I am getting nowhere. They don't even seem to be trying. I am sure the router is at fault, I even tell them, I have full speed wirelessly. At which point they say, we have nothing to do with wireless speeds, you pay for a broadband connection sir, you have to deal with those issues yourself.... I just said the speeds are fine wirelessly, yet 10meg via ethernet... do you see the problem ? Cause I do. Oh yes sir, there are too many people in your area on your network, high utilization, you need to wait 3 weeks til we fix that... Really? That's what you are going with. I hang up, phoning back the next day, finally someone sees that I am right, the router is a refurb'd piece of crap. A new router and it is fixed. 2 months later. Unfortunately, the consensus is to cancel. So, they are gone.

The girlfriend, also has virgin, and has the same issues for years. Every time you ring from hers though, you get through to rude staff, who don't care. And they have said the same, reset your stuff, or that the area is just that slow. Then why charge someone for speeds that don't exist in said area, you god damn thieves. Just today, I ask for a manager, I get, you need to talk to technical, if you are having issues. I tell her, issues are fixed, I had new stuff sent out, and its working, you cut us off ? Yes you have £10 outstanding.

There is a whole payment dilemma her side, she was told the price and had an account for bills going out, she had enough in to cover that, but they had added some charge, screwed the Direct debit up, cancelling it their end so the bank couldn't set it up again. So forever since having to pay on demand but again for what ? Always getting 10% of speeds because of faulty hardware, and no engineers sent out. And they want more money. Late payments incur their wraith of an extra £10.

How do I get 90% of services refunded as we only get 10% speeds. How do I charge these clowns for late services? Seriously they should be taken to court. I ask for "Freeview" it's £5 on one box and an extra £11.50 on the bedroom one. Are you freaking kidding me. Freeview isn't free.

TLDR: Virgin UK C U Next Tuesday: Services suck and are over priced. When will we have the packages we want. The Broadband that doesn't require a phone line at £18 a month.TV packages that we can build, instead of the only choice of crap, more crap, the stuff you want but at top tier pricing.
 
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