You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave...

Nope not April 1st

"A Virgin Media spokesperson told The Register: "We are committed to providing our customers with excellent service,""

The inking behind that will be that if customers leave they can't provide them with any service.

BT have a habit of putting people on contracts that they weren't aware of.

Want to leave? Well you can't, because you're in a two-year contract. Why? Oh, because when you phoned to complain that your broadband wasn't fast enough last month, we put you on our 'super-flexible-speed-guarantee' tariff for two years. It offers us flexibility to use your money to dream up new ways of sucking people in, and it give you our broadband speed guarantee. What's that? Oh, that means that if your speed drops to less than 1 Mbps for more than 10 consecutive night-time hours in any given year, we send you a KitKat, and sign you up to our next highest tariff for two more years.

"BT have a habit of putting people on contracts that they weren't aware of."

And if the customer hasn't signed that contract then it isn't worth the paper it wasn't written on. More so if BT didn't send the customer a copy of the updated contract.

Now, the contract you have signed may include a clause covering renewal and moving a customer to a new contract, but legally they have to notify the customer of this before it happens and include a copy (or link to) the new terms and conditions, and the customer has a right to cancel without penalty if this happens (think it's a two week window - may be a month - would need to check). That then transfers the 'signature' to the new contract, but the consumer rights do still apply.

And every single provider agrees, as long as the customer switches to their service.

Switching to a different provider ? That's not competition, that's treason .

Worst

Broadband provider

Ever

IMNSHO -- they've raised our rate from £38/mo to £68/month in the last 18 months. As I'm currently underemployed I have to have internet access. About to call and threaten to leave due to circumstances and see where, if anywhere, that gets me for a reduction! Can't take another month if I can 1/2 my bill by moving back to Fibre to the green box instead...

How on earth does that even happen though? Your price would normally only go up by that much if you were at the end of contract, and surely you'd know that you were? I just don't understand how this happens to people. I contact them well in advance of my contract ending and if anything I end up with a reduction, never an increase.

Also, if you are I assume unemployed rather than underemployed (same thing? Typo?) Then don't forget the social tariffs that are available to order from providers.

Because when Virgin say that they're increasing the price by RPI + 3%, they refer to the price before the "fixed" discount that they've offered you. Eg the package I'm on "retails" for £70 something, but 12 months ago I got them to do it for £36 (like everyone else does). They're not actually doing it for £36 though, they're applying a £34 discount on my bill. So the "retail" price went up by (for example) £10, my bill goes up by £10 too as the discount is fixed and not subject to inflationary adjustments.

Combine that with the fact that they only let you leave / renegotiate _before_ that increase happens (and supposedly let you know by some form of writing that never actually appears) and the people on the end of the phone are less than inclined to help

Ask for [1]their social tariff.

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice-for-consumers/costs-and-billing/social-tariffs

Virgin sent me a random email the other day saying my contract expired in 2015 and would I like to renew for 25% off. I'd not long renewed my contract and it had already been discounted. I'm now paying 25% less and locked in to roughly the same period of my contract than I was. Not entirely sure what's happening there. Maybe it was related to this and they are trying to head off any reputation damage?

Reputation wise, all of the big names have bad reputations. Virgin media service is different all over the country thanks to different integrated legacy networks, as well as just how much sunlight the cabinet gets at the end of your street. Customer service wise I tend to find if you use their WhatsApp it is reasonably pleasant. I've not rung them up for a while.

Sometimes when people ring to cancel they're just not firm enough about it and they let themselves get sucked in to the retentions dance. However sometimes that retentions dance can actually be in your favour and you choose not to leave anyway. If you deal with them politely and firmly on the phone I can't see how they can really make it difficult past a few offers being chucked your way that you can dismiss.

Make a reasonable number of attempts to cancel and record any calls. Send an email to the appropriate departments and if no response in two weeks just cancel the direct debit. It is amazing how fast they get in touch if they cannot get into your bank account at which point you bring up all the attempts you have made to follow their processes and please supply the MAC/PAC to move to a different provider

and no, you will not re-enable the DD

If you just cancel the DD you risk a strike on your credit rating that could make it difficult or more expensive to get credit cards, loans, etc. It could also be difficult to remove if it relies on Virgin's good will to do so.

I don't know how it works elsewhere, but in the US, you can file a dispute to any bad marks on your credit report. Companies that put the bad mark on there have 30 days to respond confirming it, or it automatically goes away. They almost never answer these disputes, so the bad mark goes away.

There is/was a business of "Credit Cleaning" where all they did was to file disputes to everything on you credit report, hoping that there would be little response to them. It did wok to some extent. You pay a fee to some outfit, and boom, your credit score is better. I'm not sure I see this as a legitimate business, however.

And of course recall all the DD since the first request to cancel.

...that companies were obligated to make sure that consumers can cancel contracts/recurring arrangements/subscriptions using the same means by which they signed up.

i.e. if you let people sign up to a service online, you have to provide functionality to let them cancel online

It's not a big ask.

"You're too dumb to use click-to-cancel, Big Biz says with straight face. Making it easy to exit subscriptions will just baffle everyone, FTC told"

Virgin say they halved the number of complaints... from what to what?

I moved from a cabled area to a non-cabled area but Virgin Media's system didn't comprehend that such areas existed. Probably because they didn't provide a conventional service to this area either. Major battle ensued to switch to a different provider.

Same experience here. Moved home recently, already checked to see if I could port my service and couldn't. Tried to cancel and All I got was chatbot that couldn't help. Called up and was told to use chatbot. A long time later (hours) I got through to somebody in, well let's not call it "cancellations", it was the "customer retention" side. Asked my reason for wanting to cancel and would I consider a different tariff (new 24 month contract ahoy). Didn't read a damn thing from the chatbot or anything else I'd divulged. Had to give them my new address so they could confirm that they couldn't help me and then agreed to cancel the service.

I was out of contract and should have been able to phone up and say "cancel and confirm my last payment date".

Better than Plusnet, though, who won't even let you cancel if you're dead!

I switched from Virgin Media to BT as I was out of contract and the BT deal was cheaper than any of the deals Virgin Media offered me. Choice from VM was limited as I was not a new customer. When I pointed out that the deal they were pushing was more expensive than the one I had been on and the rival package, they said it was the best they could do. Apart from the hassle of talking to the sales bods switching was relativity straight forward. They did ring me about a month after I had left them to offer me a new deal. Talk about desperate measures!

Another thing I hated about Virgin Media was their Customer portal. It was clunky and hard to navigate once you had logged in. The UI seemed to gave been designed in the last century. And don't even think about IPv6 as they have never heard of it.

I've found that if I want to speak to a human selecting customer complaints normally works. I explain that I don't have a complaint but can't get through to where I need to go via the chatbot, keep getting cut off etc and can they assist? Seems to work okay.

I left VM recently as the customer service was diabolical and the service was more unreliable than anything I had had previously. it took a bit of time but I was firm as I had signed up to CityFibre gigabit service. I received an email thanking me for returning the router, which is still sat on my desk! Which sort of sums up the whole experience.

"I'm moving to a different country" worked pretty well when I cancelled. It was true, too.

The other one I've heard is to tell the rep, assuming you can get through to one, that you're going to jail next week and won't be needing the service for some time.

Our stupid length contract with virgin was ending earlier this year. We had already lost a few channels we enjoyed and were ready to reduce the number of premium channels, switch our mobiles to another provider, drop the landline and greatly reduce our monthly bill; but no, the idiots on the CS line only cared about retention.

I have now switched to lebara at £4.50 a month with more than enough data to keep me happy, my partner was forced to switch from virgin to o2 and she is not happy and we cannot get rid of the premium channels (sky sports and movies, bt sport etc) as "we have no better bundle for you, sir).

I don't want a better bundle, I just want standard channels, no tie-in and no frigging fluffy bits on the side as neither of us use antisocial media.

When one dials 150 to get through to so-called customer support, be it for contractual or error reasons, we end up with outsourced call centres where the reps seem to only read from a script and have no mind or understanding themselves, alongside the fact that very few - if any - of them have any knowledge of English other than to try upselling.

This has become much worse since liberty media took over.

After having been a customer of the same company since the 90's, c&w, telewest, blueyonder, virgin, etc we find ourselves trapped in a kafkaesque situation where we cannot have sat dishes due to planning rules and therefore rely on the incumbent service.

I fucking hate them all.

After requesting cancellation, vexatious Virgin Media is still texting me offers, despite my telling them repeatedly not to by text and phone. Their latest was "Broadband for £16 a month, or £100" credit. The first option new customers can get anyway (craftily, they've rigged their website so that offers to new customers are no longer visible to existing customers, even if you delete cache and cookies of your browsers, thereby making it harder for existing customers to haggle a better deal while threatening to leave), and on a six month contract not 18 - this is how their "Loyalty Team" reward a pre-Blueyonder buyout era customer. Can't wait for disconnection on the 22nd, as this may indicate cancellation has been actioned. I pay by bill, not DD, so if there's any funny business (they say my bill next month will be £7, because a 30 day notice period is required for cancellation) I will have to consider whether to cease paying their bills to leave, because doing so will affect my credit rating.

Quite honestly I haven't been inconvenienced using the Three network via Smarty via TP-Link MR200 SIM router, which was a nice surprise: no dropouts, speeds adequate for my needs, no traffic shaping, no blocks, no contract, cheap, all my devices including SIP phones are continuously and reliably connected. Cancelling Smarty is as easy as disabling auto-renew on their website, cancelling that pre-approved payment in Paypal, and throwing away the SIM so they can't call me... which is pretty easy if you ask me.