ISP Disillusionment Thread

This thread is for you to diss/complain/warn people about certain ISP (Internet Service Provider) horrors you've suffered.

I have lots and LOTS of issues with many ISPs but I'll start with my most recent:

VIRGIN MEDIA:

Specifically, my girlfriend's connection at her place.

She has been on Virgin Media's 2meg service for 7 years.

She's been with Virgin since they took over her Cable & Wireless connection (as it was when her family moved in). Since then its been "up and down" but generally with the odd grumble it was ok.

I'm not sure about our non-uk members but here on our little isle we've been bombarded over the last year or so of Virgin's "Super-Fast Cable Broadband" which is not doing massively well right now because its too expensive.

Picking up on this, I told my girlfriend to 'watch her connection' because I suspected Virgin might pull a dirty trick like force people to take the fibreoptic broadband by making their older connections slower and worse. The vast majority of people - once they saw a demo - would upgrade and if they lost a few disgruntled people to other ISPs? no problem - Virgin can afford that.

Well at the beginning of the year her connection started to suffer and it got so bad last month that pages (like google's search engine, Google.co.uk would even "time out" before finishing loading, effectively making internet use impossible.

Every now and again it would run slow, but would be usable (this would be times like 05:00 - 09:00 or 01:30 - 03:45 btw) and all other times it just wouldn't connect.

So, on one of these times I got on the net at her place and used Speedtest.net to see what was going on.

I got this HORRIFIC result:


Not bad for £18 a month, eh? lol

In other words she was getting 0.57mb/s out of a possible 2.0mb/s.

This may not sound like much to the un-nerded but trust me, this was her connection when it was working well. When it was timing out I can only assume it was at less than 0.05mb/s - that's less than old dial-up speeds!

So, armed with this new information, I got her non-techy dad to give them a shout and ask what the disco-funk was going on. The fella wasn't actually too bad, pointing out that for the money my lass's parents were paying they should be on 10meg broadband anyway. A dude (technician) was due to come out Saturday 24.04.10.

Which he did, and I ripped that f**ker to goddamn pieces.

You should have heard the excuses, they ran from "well its obviously your antivirus" to "your computer is too old".

I stayed as quiet as I could but when my lass's dad went downstairs to get paperwork I laid some verbal smackdown on the chump, explaining how an anti-virus does nothing but check data in from a connection and doesn't slow it down in the slightest and that a computer, regardless of age, has been able to run the internet (especially non-flash/streaming pages) since the inception of Windows95. I almost made him cry which I feel a tiny bit guilty for, but not enough to let go.

I pointed out that the router was not updated by Virgin Media as is stipulated in their takeover contract from Cable & Wireless and that unless he replaced it in 48 hours I would be contacting Trading Standards and would need his name and employment number.

Cut a long story short, he seemed to have a "spare router" in his van, as well as Virgin Media updating software and lots of other little bits and pieces. He was able to get it all "upgraded" before my girlfriend's dad was even able to return.

Subsequently, with no other changes except a new modem, updated software and the guy making a call to his employers to remove certain "lockdowns" (sorry he was being guarded when he spoke of this or I would have got more info), her broadband connection now looks like this:


Not a bad little upgrade!

Now while this is a decent result, what annoys the feck out of me is the following:

1. Why were Virgin throttling back their service in the first place? nasty sell-tactics, that...

2. Why had nobody upgraded the connection from 2m to 10m seeing as they were paying for 10m?

3. Would they have left things as they were without me getting my girlfriend's dad to complain?

4. Why should he have to do that anyway?

5. What could the "technician" have conned them into buying if I wasn't there giving his ridiculous 'fixes' the slapdown?


So who else has had bad experiences they'd like to get off their chest?

I wish you had recorded this, you should report them to Watchdog they can do one of the stings on them with hidden cameras. I've just switched from Aol to Sky and apart from Aol charging me £300 to disconnect (which I got back) I never really had them much of a problem with them and so far Skys been good

Aye it was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing than a set-up though, alas.

I'm liking that Sky linkup! I'm looking into doing the sky 3-for-1 payment thing when I move in 6ish months.

The only thing I didn't like about Sky was the fact you have to use their router and you can't change the settings on it.

This is what I'm getting on my BT 'up to 10MB' package. It's not too bad - better than the 1MB I had In Bucks, so...