Virgin Broadband Can't Beat the Buffer!

Following a long and aggressive marketing campaign over the last year, many Southampton students made the decision to switch to Virgin Media as their internet service provider this October.

Adverts boasted a “superfast fibre optic broadband experience” with packages offering speeds of up 30, 60 and a whopping 100mbps.

WHY WON'T YOU F*CKING WORK!?

It all seemed too good to be true.

It was.

Many students have been reporting drastically lower speeds than they were promised and paid dearly for; and yet, at the time of writing, Virgin’s online service centre reports Southampton’s broadband to be at a “good” level.

Now, of course, it’s very easy for something to go wrong with your gear at home and cause a breakdown of some kind, especially if you’re using a wireless connection, so we took it upon ourselves to ask a number of students about their experiences in the hopes of confirming that this isn’t simply an isolated incident of a router being carelessly left next to a fish tank:

“Ran a speed test on Monday, 0.42Mbps is almost 100Mbps right? Thanks Virgin. I live on Spear Road”

“We live on Shakespeare Avenue and it’s currently around 2mbps. We phoned them a while back and they said it would massively improve by mid October but it’s still terrible. I can’t even play YouTube videos”

“We’re on Alma Road and meant to be on 60Mbps. Closer to around 1.2 truly woeful.”

“As far down as Bedford Place, ours is shocking too.”

“Had it for a month at our place on Dover Street in the Bevois Valley area. Managed to clock it at 0.3Mbps last night. We’re paying for 60. Utterly shameful.”

“We got Virgin Media 60Mb broadband on Tuesday and have had speeds lower than 1Mbps consistently since. We live on Lodge Road. We were with Sky before, which was bad… but this is even worse!”

“Getting 0.5Mbps with an ethernet cable. Paying for 60. It’s ludicrous”

“I’ve spent the past 2 weeks in a Twitter conversation with Virgin Media and they have been very good at apologising and sending out engineers. But my internet is still slow”

A frustratingly low connection speed

Angry threads on the Virgin Media community fora have started to pop up and are also, predictably, void of any communication from Virgin.

Many students we spoke to were told, upon calling customer service, that there is a general fault, however the time-frames given for any kind of repair vary wildly from story to story and cannot be confirmed.

We do have it on good authority that everyone who’s complained so far has received a refund of some kind, a cynic might assume that Virgin are keeping the fault quiet to stop us all wanting one.

Our advice? Take a few minutes out of your day and call them on 0845 454 1111 (better still, type this into Google and find an alternative that won’t cost you) to ask for your money back until such time as they can offer you an internet speed a bit faster than dial-up.

Why not cite this article while you’re at it?