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Tens of Thousands Flee From BT and Virgin
twoheadedboy writes "The two biggest ISPs in the UK are losing thousands of customers. Earlier this week Virgin reported it had lost 36,000 cable broadband customers. BT, meanwhile, has seen around 125,000 active consumer line customers flee this quarter. With that many customers leaving, where are they going?"
Maybe they are going to wholesalers/resellers? That's what they do in Canada. They sure aren't cutting cords and going wireless or giving up entirely.
There is a lot of incentive to drop "TV" and "Landline" packages however. Why waste money on what you seldom use?
Virgin suffer every time Blizzard patch World of Warcraft, their draconian management picks up the packets as p2p traffic and lowers its priority.
With the amount of WoW players, I would imagine the recurring problems are a big cause.
I think many of users was using PC+DSL by mistake, it was just a trend.
They dont need much from internet, and they realise that a phone are enough for them?
I am with BT, and will be leaving as soon as my 18 months are up. will be going to sky. 18 month contracts are too annoying.and they equipment is crap, and the limit your speed at peak times.
Earlier this week, Virgin posted a 3.9% growth figure (http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/broadcasting/news/a331943/virgin-media-reports-39-percent-half-year-revenue-growth.html). They may be loosing customers, but the ones they have are spending more money. All year, Virgin has been doing well for itself.
Yet the very day before they announced this lovely growth, they made 50 staff redundant at one of their call centres in Liverpool. Similar cuts are being made across all of their ONSHORE sites. Virgin is well known for outsourcing their call centres and part of this reputation is how poor that support is - and it'll only get worse. Evidently, someone decided to save money somewhere so more of this growth could be funnelled into profits while the going is good, but it wont last wrong when people realise that the extra money they're paying doesn't get them a premium service.
* Disclaimer: I am a former Virgin call centre employee, however I got out of there into a much better job shortly before the recent redundancies.
I have been forwarding all my FIOS ad mail to random UK addresses... I guess it finally paid off! Maybe verizon will move!
Most likely people realise paying £20+ per month is too much for checking facebook and one of the cheaper budget ISPs have stolen the customers. I know this was almost the case a year or so go with my parents, as virgin was charging around £60 per month for the worst TV package and crappy internet which they didnt use hardly ever.
The other group of people leaving these ISPs might also be ditching broadband all together because of the increase of smartphones with enough data to support light browsing/email/facebook. I know I could easily survive on my phone's 2GB/month limit for £10 a month, which for the non mathsy people is less than £20+ for broadband AND I get unlimited SMS
i get why people are running away from BT, they dont like the filtering system, but i dont get why people are leaving virgin. they are the only provider that actually give you the speeds that they advertise (on the cable network anwyay)
portfolio
Virgin is basically the only cable ISP in the UK. Whereas leaving BT just involves changing your DSL provider, which is a matter of a few phone calls, leaving Virgin involves setting up DSL at all, possibly including the installation of a new phone line - it's quite a bit more complicated and expensive.
The important thing to remember here is that Virgin are (a) relatively cheap (b) very fast (c) unbelievably shit. They're actually more incompetent now, both technically and in customer service, than they were as NTL. They are so shit that people give up cable to go back to DSL, even with the expensive faff involved.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Cant say much about virgin but BT are far too expensive. Their unlimited broadband is £20-30 a month. What's worse is the fact that they wont even sell that expensive broadband unless you also get phone service which costs an extra £10 a month regardless of if you use it.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Britain is (going to be) in a pretty bad recession (soon), which is going to hit the lower/middle classes pretty hard.. That seems to me to be a pretty good (if, of course, always only a partial) explanation for this phenomenon.
I should know, I work there. Figures will be released soon.
BT claimed for every customer that deserted Virgin in the last quarter, 20 joined BT.
Wow! It sounds like BT's doing really well! Until you actually think about it...
BT gets 20 new customers in the same time period that Virgin loses 1. But in that same time period, BT might also lose 2, and 30 might join Virgin....
The only way this statistic would be useful would be if it transpired that Virgin Broadband contracts required each customer leaving the service to be chopped into 20 pieces and sent to BT before their Migration Authorization Code could be generated.
I mean I'm in Germany and how have a quite decent small local ISP. The only thing that sucks is their e-mail server. (Its DNS resolver is heavily broken and it still doesn't support IPv6!)
Why ? Where ? .
You have two choices for an ISP in the UK:
Slow & shit or fast & shit, they don't have fast & shit in my area so I'm stuck on slow & shit aging telephone lines.
BT is a bit overpriced, but I found their service ok. I'll never go back to them after I unwittingly signed up to a self-renewing contract (I didn't even know such a thing was possible), and when it came to ending my 12 month contract with them, they told me that I hadn't given them 1 month notice prior to the end of the 12 months, and therefore they had contracted me into another 12 months. If I wanted to leave I would have to pay the entirety of the line rental for that year (nearly £200).
I'm currently on Virgin fibreoptic, and while the figures look great when you go to a broadband test website, for some reason the real-world usage is nothing like this. Streaming (especially youtube and bbc iplayer) is pretty bad, and seems to hang on a regular basis. It is much worse at peak times. And I know it can be done better having previously used superjanet 6 on university campus several years ago.
I'll probably look to moving to talktalk next - they seem well-priced and are apparently pretty quick too.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but britain ISP's are among the first to provide access data to the govt. or to implement measures to fight copyright content downloading. Maybe the customer's are being tired of being treated like shit??
We are what we fear?
Both talktalk and Sky have been doing some aggressive marketing lately. I wonder if that's where people are going.
I don't have any personal experience but I've heard that they're not much better. In particular, I've not heard a good word about talktalk.
Those customers are buying smart phones and tablets.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I'm outside the area available for Virgin Cable, and my local BT exchange can still only support speeds of up to 4mbps to my home. With a large majority of smaller cities and towns in a similar position, I wouldn't be surprised is people are moving to mobile broadband packages, which can provide similar/better speeds in area with good coverage. For those that do normal web browsing, the typical mobile data tarrif you probably have on your existing mobile phone is more than enough to cover browsing. My mobile also acts as a wireless hotspot so setup is easy.
It is a very frustrating state of affairs in the UK, with such poor coverage and the variance in speed between areas is astonishing
Quite a few people have commented saying that it's no surprise that people are leaving BT - they're more expensive, utterly useless and switching DSL providers isn't as much hassle, whereas Virgin is a different case since their technology is actually better - why would people want to leave? The reasons are numerous, let me just give a few examples:
*Call centre staff are outsourced.
80% (if not more) of the call centre staff are outsourced to Indian call centres. This immediately creates a language barrier, particularly with anyone from Scotland as the outsourced staff can't understand the accent.
*ALL Call centre staff are severely undertrained
The offshore agents are barely trained at all, as they're trained by people who have been trained by people who have been trained by someone from IBM (whom Virgin contracts to do all their support) who hasn't actually done the job. The net result is that it takes agents months to get even remotely familliar with the tools and equipment Virgin uses and that's assuming they last that long.
Onshore isn't a great deal better. They have a dedicated training team, however the training period is 4 weeks. That's for EVERYTHING the job entails, from fixing modems, to wireless, to email and Virgin security. Years ago before wireless and the value added services were a factor, the training period was 6 weeks.
Additionally, the training material is GROSSLY out of date. It dictates that 2 days are spent learning how to adjust the frequency of a modem that is no longer used by Virgin. If a customer still has one of these modems, it is meant to be replaced immediately because it's well over 3 years old (more like 6). However, the training material is controlled by Virgin, who refuse to let the training team touch it. This means trainers are forced to train out old, outdated material and try to squeeze in the "real" material when and where they can.
The hiring process is even worse. No consideration is given to how technically minded you are, or how much you know about computers. I've seen people show up for customer services roles and been told they're going to do Technical support - despite barely knowing how to use a computer themselves.
*The VM Hub and Superhub
BT have a "home hub", whereas Virgin have relied on dedicated modems and separate routers for years. This meant that customers had to have 2 separate devices to get wireless and the wireless routers weren't Virgin specific (unlike the modems), meaning that customers could say they were broke, get new ones and sell them on ebay. So Virgin decided to do an all-in-one soultion, much like BT's home hub. There were two models - the VM hub and the "superhub". The VM Hub is a DOCSIS 2 device, the super hub is DOCSIS 3. The problem? Both hubs have issues, serious issues. The wireless range on the regular hub is ABYSMAL, you can literally lose the signal from being in the same room. The Superhub is SLIGHTLY better, but still nothing on a dedicated router. But can you still plug in your own router? Nope, VM deliberately disabled the DHCP options within the HUB, meaning you have to rely on it (although a patch is coming that will enable "gateway" mode). Other issues include the firewall causing connections to drop randomly, the hub would occasionally and for no reason decide to stop leasing IPs from the network, forcing the customer offline and so on. The list goes on and on and it still isn't fixed - most customers that went from a dedicated modem to a SHUB or HUB have regretted it and wanted their old modems back, but Virgin won't let support staff issue modems any more, so you're screwed.
*Sheer incompetence
The hubs are just one example of how useless Virgin are at implementing ANYTHING - they recently changed their website to "make it better" and give customers more control of their accounts, but instead it locked many customers out of their accounts entirely. It caused emails to get orphaned from accounts, meaning support staff wouldn't even attempt to reset a password or fix it because they
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
30 quid (inc vat) all in (line rental, unlimited GB broadband, free calls to landlines) is why.
your shit is only 30 pounds ??? that is like how much just my satellite TV costs. what the fuck my cable bill is like 90 dollars just for internet!!! stinking spoiled euros
After some people I know in the UK on Virgin Media seemed to have latency issues, I did some digging and it seems every few months their traffic shaping appliance incorrectly starts classifying WoW traffic as peer to peer and consequently lag in WoW is in the 1000s of milliseconds.
See this ongoing thread:
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Fibre-optic-broadband-cable/World-of-Warcraft-Latency-Issues/td-p/167089/page/39
Any time it breaks, they take days to acknowledge the issue, when they eventually do, it then takes days before the fix is implemented. Despite no other European ISPs having the same issue, they have also had the audacity to claim in the same statement that although the fix will need to be done on Virgin Media's side, that Blizzard is also to blame because they made changes on their end without notifying Virgin Media.
I've been with BT for about 25 years, but will be switching to TalkTalk on 4th August.
I don't watch much TV, and with the recent switchover to Digital TV, I can't get any reception through my rooftop aerial, so my choices are a satellite dish or streaming services such as BBC's iPlayer.
Actually, I get a much better picture with iPlayer than I ever did through an aerial. I live in a valley - but very close to a telephone exchange ;-)
BT's over-usage charges are £5 / 5GB, and my monthly bills went up from £35 to £75.
TalkTalk, by comparison, have an unlimited package (I use 50-60GB/month, so shouldn't trigger any "fair use" problems), and are a fraction of the cost.
Even if they do suck, there's a 30 day cooling off period, during which I could presumably go back to BT, and take advantage of "new customer" discounts.
they probably can't afford broadband anymore as unemployment is increasing and so are food prices.
Having worked in a Jobcentre Plus, I can tell you that one of the first things people give up when they lose their job seems to be internet/tv and as Virgin package the two (three if you include phone) it's a big bill and unemployed people cannot afford it. Secondly, as more people buy mobile devices and internet enabled phones, they are not seeing the point to home broadband as many people (particularly women, and we have a lot of single mums in the UK) only use the internet for email and facebook.
"Well you shouldn't be using a residential email service to run your business."
Well you shouldn't. Lots of people do it as email addresses on the sides of white vans attest, but that doesn't make it sensible thing to be doing. You shouldn't use ISP provided email at all, they only provide it because once you've used it for a while it becomes a pain to switch because everyone has that email. If you run a business using an email service provided by your residential ISP you will get burned. Most people simply don't think about such things though.
As someone who was a Virgin customer for three weeks before their unbelievable poor service got so bad that we left again under the cooling off period I can say you're right on all of your points but you actually missed a few too:
The burst speed of the 30Mb line is indeed 30Mb but the effective speed is much lower. The connection suffers from incredible latency, such that the time to load an image heavy page was twice what on I now get on a 7Mb line.
Not only are the support staff incompetent, they're also outright dishonest. We were sold a package deal and then billed a higher price. Customer services then tried to say the deal we signed up for didn't exist despite it still being listed on the website.
After we left we complained and even the complaints process is just as bad. They fail to respond to letters, offer compensation but don't pay it and are generally a disgrace.
All in all it's a real shame since their V+HD TV box is genuinely better the Sky+HD (when it works), but I'd rather go back to dial-up than deal with them again for any service.
I have the Virgin 50/5 cable service and am very happy with it.
OK, I pay well over the standard rate (£44.99 a month - ~$70 USD) but I get a genuine 48Mbit/s down and 4.5Mbit/s up. I've found their technical support to be excellent and when I used to play WoW I'd have a consistent 30-40ms latency. I run my home office via a Cisco IPSec VPN tunnel and use HD video and voice all the time with almost no issues.
When I contrast this to my BT DSL service in my old place, I was lucky to sync in at 1Mbit/s down and 500Kbit/s up. Whole weekends of sparse connectivity weren't a surprise and I got used to having to go in to the office to work on my regular "no internet" days. All over a "super fast ADSL2+ line". My experience isn't unique, anyone living in an area with ancient cables far from the exchange is stuck in this situation.
So for me at least, Virgin can take my money. It works great, I have had almost no issues and when they say 50Mbit/s I'm pretty much getting it. I'm looking at moving house next year and a genuine criteria is decent internet. Virgin cable will be a good sign for me.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
The reasons are a lot to do with combined internet/telephony packages, which are wrapped up with significant monthly savings, an inability to be flexible in what must be one of the most fast-changing industries in all history, and an inability to meet the specific needs of individuals.
I have been with BT since before it was privatised, but now I doubt I shall stay with them. The reason is because they cannot (will not?) offer a static IP as a part of their package. With IPv6 available, and with many years having past for them to enable it, there really isn't any excuse left for this, especially as I am happy to pay for such a service. My current DSL provider (TalkTalk, but under an old, permanent Nildram contract which they are desperate to get me off of - and I'm moving house, so they will get their wish granted) can reduce my telephony bill by about £50 pcm, and they've been more than happy to provide me with a static IP (v4!)
There's been a LOT of mergers in the UK - it's getting harder to find a good DSL provider that meets my needs. But combined accounts and flexible facilities are why the big companies are losing out.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
With that many customers leaving, where are they going?
Outside?
What?
The Superhub is SLIGHTLY better, but still nothing on a dedicated router. But can you still plug in your own router? Nope, VM deliberately disabled the DHCP options within the HUB, meaning you have to rely on it (although a patch is coming that will enable "gateway" mode).
I have a SuperHub with VirginMedia and I use my own router: you need to set "DMZ Host" in the "SuperHub" advanced settings to the IP of your own router's WAN port. That means that your router's external IP looks like a private IP (in a different subnet from the LAN obviously) but that's not a problem in practice.
I still have a BT phone line, but my ISP is with BE There, a LLU provider who have their own equipment in my exchange.
It's cheaper and much faster. With BT I was limited to 8/1 mb/s, whereas on BE I get 24/2 mb/s. In practice I sync at 16/2. So it's twice as fast for half the cost. The support is much better, I can use the "Live Chat" feature to make changes to my broadband profile, ask technical and billing questions, without being stuck on the phone. I find writing technical questions much easier than trying to explain it over the phone.
Using smaller LLU companies really offers a lot more value to the consumer.
Friends of mine who aren't really bothered about fast internet speeds are taking our Sky Broadband as part of their satellite TV package, costing an extra £5 or £6 per month. You can't compete against that for the money, single billing provider etc.
People are not leaving BT completely but rather switching call providers. BT are a monopoly in the UK, they are the only national provider of landlines. Due to regulation they are forced to allow third party telecoms providers to lease the lines at a wholesale rate. As a result there are hundreds of so called providers that do nothing more than lease the lines at wholesale prices and then sell them on to the consumer at a lower rate than the BT retail price. BT have been continually increasing their retail prices for both line rental and call charges so consumers are naturally switching their call traffic to the cheaper resellers. As others have said Virgin are useless and their prices are not competitive so people are switching to DSL either to get a better deal or better service. Note, BT retail are in fact gaining broadband customers despite loosing landline customers as they offer the most competitive Fibre To The Cabinet DSL service and many of the other DSL providers are either not offering FTTC or are far more expensive than the BT Infiniti option.
Indeed, I may have glanced over that point a bit too much - where there's a will, there's a way, but Virgin doesn't in any way endorse or support what you've done there. If average joe calls in and says "this new hub is shit, can I use my old router?" they get told no and IF the agent tells them yes, the agent will be reprimanded for it because the next time average joe calls in and gets someone who doesn't know how it, he'll get pissed off and say "Last time I was told I can do it, now you're saying I can't?".
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
You forgot that after using the service at full speed for more than 45 minutes (I was on the M package), you go over your download quota and are throttled to 25% speed for five hours. I've just moved and instead of Virgin 10Mbit cable I'm on Sky DSL. I get 9Mbit max down, but my average speed is much higher than 2.5Mbit. I'd get fibre if it were available, but my money will not go into VM's pockets again - this older, "inferior" DSL technology gives me a better experience because of the lack of VM's shitty traffic management policies.
I probably missed more than a few, but I figured the post was long enough as it was. Honestly, aside from the technology in use (and by that, I mean using a cable network, not the actual implementation of that network), Virgin has very few saving graces.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Here in Sweden we see a substantial move from wired (Cable and DSL) broadband to wireless (HSPA and LTE). There are great savings (logistically and money) to be made if you skip traditional (copper) telephony and go all cell phone. Many (most?) have smartphones with tethering and generous data plans, and the carriers are happy to sell you a companion dongle for your computer for just a little additional charge to the data plan.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Britain could always pass reform to raise its debt ceiling LOL. The only question, after all the debate and positioning, would be : who the hell is actually going to loan them this money?
All that sounds like a dramatic improvement over Sky customer services, who seem to have crossed the line from "incompetent" to "malicious".
Mobile broadband, the third millennium (fake) dream.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Once people who drop wired Internet in favor of 3G get hit with huge overages for watching video all evening, they'll switch back and set up Wi-Fi. Or do British carriers not have the 5 GB/mo cap?
This immediately creates a language barrier, particularly with anyone from Scotland as the outsourced staff can't understand the accent.
I don't think Indians are the only ones that have that problem.
Was with Nildram, they got picked up by TT (after a long series of other mergers), service hit the rocks within a week or two, dire throttling issues even on normal use, service not available far too often. After nearly 10 years of service with Nildram and no complaints at all we swapped (*to* Virgin) overnight.
Nildram used to be really good- I formerly recommended it because although not the cheapest, it was reliable and consistently rated very highly by its users. Even after Tiscali took over it didn't go downhill as much as I'd feared.
However, it's now a total dog. The Nildram account I was using had silently been upgraded from 512Kbps to 2Mbps then at some point after the TalkTalk takeover was clearly downgraded to 1Mbps- I know, because I noticed it being slower and checked, and it was consistently just under the 1Mbps mark. This was around the time it started being total fucking shit, with timeouts and other problems happening if you were trying to do too much at once (which wasn't a problem even back when Nildram was 512Mbps).
BTW, Nildram- which was under the "Opal Internet" brand at one stage- is now "Talk Talk Business", so avoid it whatever name it goes under.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've been with virgin and switched back to DSL exactly for the reasons you mentioned. That post pretty much sums it all. Spot on!
I've been one of there customers for over a decade and only stay with them as ADSL just doesn't work very well in my 1930s apartment building. I guess 80 year old phone wiring isn't that great. I use it solely as an IP services and wouldn't trust them with looking after email or anything like that. On the whole the IP service does mainly work most of the time, or it did with my original 1990s cable modem, which sadly died last month. The guy who came out to fix, didn't seem to know what an Apple Mac was and that completely confused him. First new modem he installed topped out at 1.5mb and he tried to fob me off with it, once that didn't work he found another in this van, after claiming not to have any more on him and then left me with a broken connection for 24 hours. The guy didn't have two IQ points to rub together and was mainly interested in getting to his next job.
Still no sure about the new Virgin hub that has replaced it, however, it is to be replaced with a SuperHub next week when I bit the bullet and have them upgrade me from 10mb to 50mb. The SuperHub had lots of issues when it came out at the end of last year and I've been waiting for the complaints to die down on the forums, before taking the plunge. Still not sure if this is a bad idea or not.
My advice, if like me cable is the only option, then only use it as IP transit and hope that you don't ever have to call them.
We fwee westal wirgins wonly, you willy wabbit
We skipped the light fandango
And turned cartwheels across the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
The crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
We called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray
And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale
She said there is no reason
And the truth is plain to see
But I wandered through my playing cards
Would not let her be
One of sixteen vestal virgins
Who were leaving for the coast
At the moment my eyes were open
They might just as well have been closed
And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale
Are call centers a new phenomenon to the UK? I find foreign call centers to be commonplace even for small business. It seems virgins call center would be superior to the call center for the sole cable provider in Northern Michigan where they simply read from a generic script.
You could be (correct), but (then again) you might be (wrong). Interesting (times we live in).
...are people moving house to areas where Virgin isn't available. This can include parts of the same town. (Bath, for example, has Virgin in the south, but not around the Walcot area).
Some people might move to Hull, where even BT isn't available, and the abysmal Karoo have a monopoly.
AAISP has IPv6. I'm switching to them. Had Virgin before - cheap, fast, but crappy and unreliable.
Yes, ADSL is sooo 200x, but Andrews & Arnold is the most competent ISP from what I've heard.
The Superhub has a connection bug that cannot communicate with newer Linux kernels, regardless of protocol being used. It's been there for most of this year.
On BT I got just around 2Mbps down and 448kbps up - which frequently dropped to less than 512kbps down and 64kbps up, and dropped out altogether when I used my HF transmitter.
Now I get around 3.7Mbps down and 1Mbps up on Orange, with far greater reliability although I do notice that sometimes the latency is a bit higher. I'm not playing online games that often so that doesn't bother me particularly, and it only seems to be DNS that's particularly affected.
They even manage to be cheaper.
FWIW I agree with the spirit of most of the above except perhaps the section "*Some Virgins are more virgin than others" that might require some further elaboration. Having the somewhat tenuously related experience of being an IBM'er (to use the accepted colloquialism) from 1974 to 1994 and 1999 to 2002 particularly when I left IBM Global Services in 2002 our group already had strategic alliances in place with Cisco (who had taken over/re-licensed all IBM Routing equipment and thus responsible for maintenance/customer support in that context).
Naturally many here presumably appreciate that quite a significant majority of Cisco equipment drives the VM HFC/DOCSIS network?.
So in addition IBM were well down the road of providing a total turnkey maintenance contract as the article author infers. This included call-centre support via agency staff (via quoted agencies) and use of IBM (ex Sudbury) training staff. 6 Sigma Quality,Kanban,JIT were all the buzz words of the decade . followed by empowerment, team cohesion, customer is key, and the ubiquitous Thomas Watson Snr quote: Think!;)
However some anecdotes that perhaps illustrate why I for the second time (yes I was employed twice by IBM during my working life?) parted company was that a lot of the "image" projected did not deliver what I considered was a honest/spirited customer supportive approach that Thomas originally envisioned back in the early 50's.
However this is not about IBM but VirginMedia so the relevance is actually tangentially related to this:
1. Circa 2000 IBM transferred their Centre of Competence (Lab) for their DB2 (a Relational DataBase Management System product) from Toronto to India. Within 12-months IBM had so much corporate "angst" that they were forced to consequently transfer it back again or risk loosing significant Blue-chip/Fortune 500 accounts!!
2. HSBC had two data centres Sheffield and India that had DB2/OS2 systems deployed. I once calculated it took me an additional 28%of my time (and I suspect the teams) in supporting the Indian based datacentre versus the UK one.
3. Whereas quality feedback between our Level2/2.5 at Basingstoke and our Level 1 callcentre at Greenock/Spango Valley was I consider very effective (despite the differences between regional Glaswegian and Hampshire accents) I was not aware of any significant feedback process with India that even approached a significant percentage of UK's quality target.
4. From a business perspective the Tupe'd transfer of some Swansea NTL networking staff to IBM is a matter of public record as NTL exited Chap11 bankruptcy in US after the millenium.
Before I get accused of being a xenophobic racist bigot I should point out that many Indian/Punjabi and Pakistani colleagues and personal friends of mine that I had the privilege of working closely with in my couple of decades with IBM always significantly outperformed both myself and their UK counterparts in terms of the work ethic. I could always rely on them all to immediately engage (from initial problem outline) with enthusiasm in supporting a customer related problem rather than waste my time alternatively "pitching the problem in excruciating detail" to a lot of their uk colleagues and I feel proud and honoured to have had the opportunity to work with them all. :(
The difference being of course the management style/socio-economic & cultural differences between the two continents!
VM's problem (and thus down the chain IBM's Global Services) is simply that they have so distanced themselves from the end customer that any qualitative feedback mechanisms are so torturously weighted with contractual bureaucracy that they are totally inflexible and unresponsive but skewed more towards management derived reporting systems only. That is the price we(end customer) pay for mass consumer (aka cheap) services(and thus support) in an extremely competitive/dynamic market.
Tony (aka Horseman) ex PS Assist/PS3 IBM Basingstoke.
I think the key to this is that BT and Virgin are "the two biggest ISPs" in the UK. While the equipment may be the same for most ISPs, the really big ones like BT and Virgin have the worst customer service and the most uncaring attitude. Huge, soulless profit machines.
As a long-term ADSL user living about 4 km (about 2.5 miles) from the nearest telephone exchange, I get a little over 3 Mbps download on a good day. The copper wires and the exchange belong to BT, so no matter what ISP you go with you will always get similar performance as long as you employ ADSL. I started out with Demon, then when that got big and fat and uncaring I shifted to Nildram, and then a few years later to fast.co.uk, a very small ISP with superb customer service. They still can't get me much more than 3 Mbps, though, until BT gets its finger out and lays on FTTC to my house.
All this time, I could have got much faster performance by going to Virgin. Indeed, a few years ago I was a Virgin customer for TV and phone - back then I was using ISDN over cable. But even though I could get up to 50 Mbps within a few days, without paying much more, I refuse to exchange fast.co.uk's excellent and knowledgeable service for Virgin's clowns.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
BT were unable to get an existing phone line working in my new house, even after 4 weeks - they were utterly incompetent. Different support staff (in different countries!) gave different advice & prices, and engineer appointments were wrongly made and moved about. Their procedures and quality of support was shocking. Never again.
In the end I gave up and ordered VM online, and quickly had cable installed and working. The connection is completely reliable and consistently gives much better latency than my previous BT broadband setup, at the same price.
For me, it's a case of "VM 1 - BT 0".
SKY also has a lock on many channels and HD channels.
So You have to get SKY TV and with SKY TV you get deals to get SKY HSI.
You can pretty much search and replace all instances of Virgin with Comcast and it'd still be remarkably accurate.
Fixed the title for you.
can fall back on its highly profitable space tourism business... Oh wait. It's delusional and won't ever work beyond the first few idle rich. Bahahahaa!!!!
Virgin, despite seeing sales rise two per cent, saw 36,000 cable broadband customers leaving over the last quarter. In more positive news for the ISP, it saw revenue rise 2.2 per cent.
So revenue rose but number of customers declined by 36,000. That means Virgin raised their rates and 36000 more people than not responded by saying "That's too expensive for me." Add the losses together and that means cable/dsl has gotten too expensive for 191,000 people in Britain. Given the state of the economy, that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
Sounds like Qwest. Now I know where they learned customer service from.
I've been saying for a long time that Virgin's cable network should be regulated by OFCOM and forcibly opened up to competition, like BT's was. I don't give a shit if it hits Virgin's bottom line; it's in the public interest. Seems Virgin are doing their utmost to prove me right.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Playing on the world level concurrence of the workers, companies managed now to get a close to zero value on their “little hands” paycheck. The gained “extra value” of competence leads to a close to zero value on their effective production and waste most of the gain they could have made, but as the commercial value of that work is close to 100%, they don’t even notice.
(In the meantime, jobs and money are drained off our area of the world.)
Those companies are playing on their apparent ominous strength.
As did the mining companies with their worker in the 18th century.
At that time, workers had to find a solution into the unions.
Now that companies can so easily relocate, unions have lost their point.
It seems to me that it’s the consumers now, who should need a strong union.
Working just the same way: if fair, backing their legal disputes for compensation,
and eventually proposing boycott for an unacceptable situations [which should include the protection of the workers, and in that way loosing up the motivation for relocation.]
I think such a structure, such a self-consciousness, needs to be put in place to balance the evolution of the power-relationship.
ASAP
The stinking euros live on the continent. Brits know how to shower, use deodorant and not wear the same stinking clothes every day.
Oh, with the exception of Germany and Scandinavia, they're nice and clean.
almost sounds like a company I work for...
OT but I thought no one could understand the Scottish, and that was one of their blessings.
Meanwhile, BT are not very good either. I have elaborated why here.
You may notice a lot of, shall we say, "psychotic rage". This is not an accident.
I write bullshit
I never realised that the Super Hub was in any way crippled, apart from performance. When ours arrived, we just set it up as a cable modem by disabling the wireless mode on it and fed it into our Apple Extreme router. Works perfectly. YMMV as ever.
This is far worse than I could have ever dreampt.
Just FYI, Sky Broadband uses the same infrastructure as BT Broadband (both use BT OpenReach cabling). If you find BT laggy at peak times, you'll find Sky just the same.
If they're using Redback edge routers for the BRAS function (and I think they are) they can configure the metering separately for the BT and Sky customers using the virtual routing feature. As long as the link(s) from the DSLAM to the BRAS and the paths from the BRAS to the respective carriers' backbones aren't saturated, the two services don't interfere.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Am I the only one to see in this long thread the invisible man of the customer choosing just and only the cheaper?
Dumb customers always behave like that.
I'm surprised so many are leaving BT as I've found that their service is the best of a bad lot. Their Home Hub is indeed very reliable, and their outsourced staff in India are very good and helpful (even though I totally disagree with global capitalist exploitation).
I concur with the above about Virgin Media... a truly appalling company. Comcast cable were great, even NTL: were excellent by comparison. VM 'customer care' had my wife in tears after accusing her of "an attitude problem", and this awful company tried to bill me for services to two houses at £300 after we moved... even though they were informed in writing.
All UK ISPs need thorough investigation as OFCOM are toothless. Lies over line speeds and appalling customer care... it's all another example of 'rip off Britain'.
One point - you say you can't use your own router on a virgin hub. I have the DOCSIS2 hub and plugged into one of the ethernet ports is my Netgear router. It works perfectly, and really, why shouldn't it?
I'll have to throw in a contrasting opinion here as I thing Virgin are getting bashed over-heavily. I've been a customer since the NTL days (and still have one of the old Terayon modems gathering dust) but have no other interest in Virgin.
I do a lot of support to friends and thus see a lot of other broadband offerings. At my day job we have a separate BT connection (unfiltered and separate from the corporate network, used to SSH to perform web publishing) so have a lot of experience with BT's kit. I've also had occasion to use the DSL offerings from Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin.
While Virgin's technical support is absolutely awful, I've had to ring them up once in the last three years. That's when I'd retired an old BEFSR41 and the new router wouldn't play ball with the Terayon (which itself was about seven years old at the time). The problem was something to do with autonegotiation of the duplex settings or something - anyway a new modem sorted that out.
I traded up to the 30Mbit service via the Superhub back in March. While it does lack a number of settings (and was pretty bloody awful when initially delivered) it works reasonably well with my proper router put into the DMZ and everthing else switched off. I won't defend their delays in failing to provide bridged mode networking, as this is something they've failed to provide.
But the service they do provide is something I have absolutely no problems with. And I use it pretty damn heavily. I retrieved my full catalogue from gog.com last week - pushing 20GB - during the mid-afternoon. I've a server running torrents 24/7 (throttled during peak times at my end), so this was *after* about fourteen hours of torrenting. I've *never* experienced slow-downs or traffic shaping. I have RDP opened on my server and connect to that - again, never any problem with it.
Compared to the hideousness that is broadband over DSL of any stripe, I'm more than satisfied with Virgin's service - as long as you never have to rig up their 'tech support'.