I know we all often moan on here about lousy service, but I'm actually
pleased to announce that for once, I've had some really great help !

I've had Virgin Media for my broadband service since forever - right back to
the original NTL days in fact - and it had always performed flawlessly. A
couple of months back, we made the decision to transfer our telephone
service to them from BT, and our television service from Sky, as between the
three of them, it had crept up to costing us the better part of £120 a
month, and Virgin could offer the same services for around £70. The number
was ported seamlessly from BT, and the shiny new Tivo box was installed and
all worked ok. I did, however, have a small gripe on the phone service in
that the caller ID no longer worked. I posted a question about this on
Virgin's telephone forum. Within a couple of hours, a reply had been posted
by one of their support engineers saying that there had been a small problem
with the way that the account had been set up, and that he had corrected it
and it should all be working now. And it was !

A couple of weeks later, after the first really cold night, I had my first
ever internet fault that wasn't resolved by the usual modem reboot. It was a
problem with the return path outside the house, and my neighbour had lost
his service also. We both reported it as a problem, and they were out within
a couple of hours. They got it working again, but it happened again a few
days later. Eventually, it took them four attempts to get to the bottom of
the problem, but to give them their due, they stuck at it, escalating the
problem ever further up the chain, until it reached some senior technicians
who were able to correctly track the problem to a fault in the return path
amplifier in the nearby street cabinet.

I also discovered last week that I had another small problem with the phone.
The package has a free voicemail service, and I discovered that people had
been leaving me messages, but I was not aware of this, because my dial tone
did not change from steady to intermittent. So I rang them today, and spoke
to a very helpful Indian lad, who worked through the problem with me,
checking what he could from his end. He determined that it was an exchange
problem, and put me on hold for just a couple of minutes. When he came back
to me, he said that he had spoken to a colleague who was at that moment
resolving the issue. He took my mobile number and asked me to put the phone
down and then check to see if I had the intermittent dial tone, as his
colleague would leave me a message to say it was fixed. He said that he
would call me on my mobile in five minutes to check that it was ok.

It was, and he did call me back to check.

I'm sure there will be some who have had less than satisfactory service from
Virgin, but for my part, I have been very pleased at the way I have been
treated, and the efforts that they have gone to, to resolve my problems, so
well done V.M. ! :-)

Arfa