I’ve just got off the phone with Virgin Media.  After an entire weekend of nothing more that 100KB/s downloads on my supposed 20Mbit connection I’d had enough.  Yes, this is a rant. ;)

Calling the "free" support number I’m told to redial a premium rate number for Internet support.  In Virgin’s favour someone answered within a few seconds and started to diagnose my problem.  Initially no problems were found but my rate was still way under the service I’ve been promised. 

As a bit of background, Virgin does do traffic management during peak times.  On my specific package if I go over 3GB during these peak times, my 20Mbit speed drops to 5Mbit which I consider completely acceptable.  In this specific instance, I’ve done 2GB the entire day.

After much argument by the most rude support person ever, I was told I was being traffic managed.  After explaining to her how my traffic management was supposed to work, she then backtracked and said traffic management was not being applied to my account.  Followed up by the fact that Virgin was testing other traffic management procedures and this could possibly be the reason.  This could have been the tipping point for me as I CANNOT believe that an ISP can test traffic management on accounts that are expecting certain levels of service.  Absolutely unacceptable in my books.

After another level of argument where the technician would constantly interrupt me trying to explain that I thought something was wrong, out came the information that if I wanted a ticket lodged against a problem, I would probably have to pay for the engineer’s time.  Umm, excuse me?  I’m paying Virgin Media every month for an expected level of service.  This should INCLUDE fixing any problems that may occur on my line or anywhere along the wire.

I’m starting to wonder if Virgin can actually supply the 20Mbit that they promise.  Do they have the capacity during peak times to supply the bandwidth that I and many other people pay to receive.  Virgin, wake up.  Get your customer support to sport a professional face, even if it is a facade and get my Internet working.  Tomorrow will come a phone call to customer service which will probably end up in nothing being done as per Virgin’s normal activity.