Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
Because 80% of their call centre staff are outsourced to India. The training they receive is abysmal, they're rude and regularly just hang up on people. If you are with virgin and don't have an issue, you're fine, but if you have ever had an issue, it's a nightmare to get it sorted.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Yes. There are a lot of terrible cheap ISPs.
I use Zen, and the other good geek-friendly ISP is A&A. These companies do not fuck with your connection. They just don't. They're competent, they're nice, they have customer service. However, they're not cheap - £20-30/month. When cheap, shitty ISPs are offering deals at £8/mo, people go for the cheap deal, and promptly get what they're paying for.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
At the beginning of the century, Virgin were a good ISP. Price, speed and a ONE month contract.
BT is the choice of joe six-pack, and seriously piss me off. When some anti-consumer bullshit is going down, BT are always first in the headlines. (Virgin and talk talk shortly after)
And they had an advert which spun the benefits of 802.11n as a benefit of choosing their service.
"Wireless keep dropping out? Oh, you need the latest BT home hub".
Which basically translates to, the marketing department couldn't come up with one single other benefit of using their shite service.
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.
Also, I know exactly two people who have been Sky Broadband customers- both were happy Sky TV customers, but were furious Sky Broadband customers- terrible customer service, endless technical problems, appalling support, and one of them was ripped off somewhat with the pricing (charged for a high-sped package that their local network couldn't support- paid it for 6 months until they finally managed to squeeze a refund out of them).
My advice is that if you must use the OpenReach network, go with one of the smaller players; at least they tend to offer better tech support when things go inevitably wrong.
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!)
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
If you're a Sky TV customer though, their broadband is cheap or even free, depending on the package, so for those people it's probably hard to beat.
Personally I'm on Virgin broadband, and if anyone was offering more than 2Mbps DSL where I live, I'd switch, but right now I don't seem to have an option. My connection used to be good, but something about the way they've implemented their traffic management, or perhaps some other aspect of their network changes over the last year, means that my connection at times is practically useless.
Oh no... it's the future.
+1. Zen are excellent; their caps are too low, but the service is *outstanding*.
With that many customers leaving, where are they going?
Outside?
What?
The systems are generally OK - I'm in the middle of nowhere and get a reasonable 2Mb/s most of the time, the home hub does the job and is fairly easy to use, but where they really fall down is whan anything goes wrong. We were recently down to 20Kb/s max for about three days and got nothing from telephone support other than "your line is rated at 2.8Mb/s" and the usual "can you reset your router" (and, memorably, "have you tried unplugging the ethernet cable?" on a machine with no wireless card).
Yup, the telephone support absolutely sucks. Their Twitter support, on the other hand, is really rather good - good communication, the guy (Keiran I think) actually seemed to know what he was talking about, and they got the problem fixed. He even got the xkcd shibboleet reference, and that is what it felt like talking to them after the phone support debacle. I seriously hope BT read this and put whoever deals with their Twitter support in charge of everything. (@BTCare should you need them).
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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.
Zen don't sell something they can't deliver. But when they sell you 100GB, then by damn you get every byte of it, no filtering or traffic-shaping bollocks or whatever.
We regularly use a large chunk of our allowance in prime-time hours - my daughter basically gets her CBeebies and iPlayer via computer as we don't own a dedicated television - and have never had a hiccup. The only trouble I have ever had with the service has been when BT are shit (they wholesale the DSL).
Zen and A&A also explicity and sincerely support and understand the importance of Internet freedom in general, which is another reason to give them money.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Depending on exactly how you define resellers.
What has become increasingly common here in the UK is local loop unbundling. With local loop unbundling BT openreach* owns the physical line but the provider can operate their own ADSL gear. Afaict lines can be unbundled for just ADSL or for ADSL and voice (not sure if they can be unbundled for voice only or for ADSL and voice to different providers). LLU allows providers to avoid the high costs of using BTs ADSL backend network but comes at a price in that. So there are only a handful of LLU providers of which SKY and O2/BE (O2 bought BE but they still operate services under the BE name as we as their own) seem to be regarded as the best.
There are also many BT wholesale based providers but due to the way BT prices access to their backend network these tend to be expensive, congested or both.
* Part of BT but kept somewhat seperate from BTs other operations by the regulator.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Just be glad you live in a well-connected country. I pay $75/mo for 1.25 down and 512k up... and it's the best value available to me by far.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah, but how beautiful would it be if they were "giving up entirely"? Tens of thousands of people in the UK choosing to leave the internet. All at the same time.
Torchwood would get on it and big gay Jack would figure it right out. But only after much tension and drama.
Seriously, all these people left their ISPs because THEY'RE BROKE. They're now all stealing WiFi from their neighbors with open routers.
God bless 'em, every one.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I agree.
I had virgin internet, telephone, and TV for five years in my flat in Edinburgh. I've only ever suffered about one outage a year during that time, and after the first time I learned it was easier and less effort just to turn everything off and try again tomorrow. Definitely easier than fighting their phone "support".
I doubt if this is a distinction between British and American English, anyway. It's more a common colloquialism. As an editor, I am for ever asking authors not to write "Microsoft are doing..." because I prefer to see organizations referred to as single things - distinct from their employees, directors, shareholders, etc.
Books of English usage have always pointed out that both forms are permissible. A standard example is "The Cabinet was united in its decision" versus "The Cabinet were arguing about the matter all day". In the first case, the Cabinet is being treated as a single body, whereas in the second the writer wishes to stress the separate people who are members of it.
Personally, I think this rule would favour "BT is crap", on the grounds that it is the company that is crap rather than its individual employees. Indeed, it is one of the unfathomable mysteries of big corporations that they manage to prefrom so badly when they employ so many talented and hardworking people.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I don't agree with the idiot for picking on your language, but your funny. American's got the Z spellings from the BRITISH English, before it started spelling things with S's like the FRENCH. We got it from you!
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.
Tens of thousands of people in the UK choosing to leave the internet. All at the same time.
Actually, it's becoming an interesting choice. I grew up (or rather, I got older) in an age when there was no internet, or even very many computers, but like most of us here have allowed the internet to creep into my headspace. I don't particularly regret that, but it does give a bit of perspective.
I live in Australia, and I seem to have acquired a habit of making lifestyle choices that involve living in locations that are only tenuously served by mobile or satellite internet connections. I don't regret this either, but when your choices are that limited in terms of bandwidth, you do learn to prioritise what you need out of your connection, and your reliance on "analogue" input increases.
I don't do Facebook (perhaps I'm not that social an animal), but I have a select number of "meatspace" friends with whom I keep in touch via phone/Skype/email. But for the most part, I am essentially unplugged from the internet. When I'm in the cities, surrounded by drones clutching their handheld devices with a death-grip, it occurs to me that we need to let go of the Net from time to time if we are to maintain any depth to our consciousness.
Well, the republican's are at least half at fault, as they've been one of only two parties with even the possibility for controlling the spending of the US.
And the republican's don't seem to want to avoid defaulting. Their plan seems to be to just delay it until next year during the presidential election race.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
A crumpet is a cheap woman of lose morals.
A bung hole is the hole in the side of a barrel.
I can think of better uses for a crumpet.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm not saying I disagree, but whats the value you see in this depth?