I’ve been having trouble with my internet for a few days. Initially, I was in quite a foul mood about it as Virgin Media have been giving such a piss poor service since they took over NTL. I’ve experienced all sorts of appalling speeds, awful customer service and useless tech support. To add a nice kick in the teeth, as the quality has gone down, the prices have proportionately gone up.
Anyway, things were actually going quite well until around the time of that power cut several days ago. Since then, the internet has been slow and inconsistent, but on Friday evening it came to a complete stop. I hooked up the PC directly to the modem (it’s usually via a wireless router) but no luck. I then connected wirelessly to two neighbour’s networks and theirs were down as well. Bloody marvellous. I envisioned another tedious call to the 25p-a-minute support line in India, to no doubt be told it was my fault somehow. Or that they would begrudgingly send an engineer sometime over the next fortnight.
I also checked the Virgin Media status page and, typically, there was no mention of a fault in the area. This wasn’t unexpected, as when they are aware of a fault it still doesn’t get posted on there a lot of the time…..
I decided to wait until hubby got home an hour later and he half-heartedly phoned support. Except, to our utter astonishment, they were actually helpful! Rather than being told to reboot the modem (cause nobody would think to try that for themselves now, would they?) or fob us off with the old “you’re using XP or Vista and we don’t support it” crap, the engineer took the time to look at the network and actually saw there was a problem – a short circuit it seems. Hubby had noticed our local green box was slightly damaged and, with the stormy weather we had earlier in the week, it seems some rain must have got in and caused mayhem.
Being that it was late Friday night, I didn’t expect much (if anything) to be done over the weekend. But once again, to my pleasant surprise, the engineer was able to get someone on it straight away. He informed hubby that it should be fixed by 8am Saturday morning and, if it wasn’t, to ring back and someone would attend promptly. We didn’t even have to wait that long, it was up and running again before we went to bed. I really was impressed. To put the icing on the cake, as it was a network issue, the cost of the call was credited to my bill.
If this is how Virgin Media tech support now operate, I have to say my faith in their service is returning. I’ve been with this ISP under one name or another for about 8 years and I’d prefer to stay with them if I can. When everything is working, they do seem to be the best in the market.