[UPDATED] At last , something nice to say about NTL (Virgin Media)

UPDATE Please ignore all that I say about Virgin Media below. They have lived up to their reputation as being the most incompetent company on the planet. Want to know why?

I have been with NTL for the past 5 years, generally i haven’t had a need to call their support line. The connection has been ok, no problems with the modem and speed has been what i would expect for a 4mb line. The few occasions I have needed to call them, resulted in someone Googling for a solution to my problem. How did I know this? because I had moments earlier done the same and recognised the solutions and the order in which he was relaying them to me.

Since the Virgin media buyout, merger or whatever actually happened. (I should have paid closer attention). The connection had gotten progressively worse, to the point where it was quite often not much faster than dial-up. Having shopped around I realised that I wasn’t on a good deal, there were many ADSL ISP’s with better offers. Speed wasn’t my only deciding factor, I mean, how fast does your connection need to be when all you do is work, browse and check emails, I wanted a connection that was, for the most, reliable. I decided to call BT to find out if I actually had a BT line coming into the house. Having done a mountain of DIY over the years chances are I probably had chopped it, or worse still, wired it into the electrical mains.

The BT engineer came out and confirmed that i did have a line coming into the house. The problem was that i had in fact tied it to the outside fence (well i didn’t know!). He then offered to rewire it all since the wiring was too old to be used. To test the line he needed to transfer it from NTL to BT, since i hadn’t decided which ISP to go for i didn’t want to initiate the transfer, as a result the engineer couldn’t re-lay the wires. Company policy apparently.

About a week later, i got a call from Virgin Media saying that they thought that i wasn’t getting value for money and so would like to offer me something to keep me as a customer. The timing of this call was suspicious, I then found out that my account had been flagged as one that has been in touch with BT and had initiated a line transfer. So they were willing to offer all sorts to keep me as a customer. In the end they offered me a free broadband upgrade from 4mb to 10mb (then 20mb when available) and free 24/7 landline phone calls.

I was completely gob smacked. So for the same money I now had 10mb broadband with free landline phonecalls. Cool! :)

For the next few days i ran several speed tests at the following sites:

www.speedtest.net

www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk

www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html

www.broadbandgenie.co.uk

All of them reported that I was on 4mb still, and not 10mb. So i called the support line, I was a bit wary as my one and only previous call ended with a person who knew how to Google helping me. To my surprise, they were unbelievably helpful. As expected, i ended up in India, but the person would not stop trying to help. He even called me back later to ask if what he suggested or tried worked. In the end it turned out to be the unreliability of the speed test sites, one they suggested to use (www.numion.com) actually reported an average of 9mb which proved that it had in fact been upgraded.

I know this isn’t a true reflection of the support service as a whole. For every one happy customer there will no doubt be at least one unhappy customer. But the level of support has definitely stepped up a notch since the merger. Lets hope the broadband line’s performance and reliability will shortly follow.