My family have been a loyal sky customer for 10 years. A few months ago they moved to Virgin because the deal was cheaper and the broadband speeds were much better. Whilst the broadband is a step above, the TV package is so far behind Sky it's hard to take. We have both a Tivo and Virgin Samsung box. The Samsung box is by far the most awkward system i've have ever used. Slow, lagging and the set up is a cheap knock off of it's competitors. I also asked it to record one program and a week later, it had recorded it but all it's repeats. This was a 3 hour program so nothing else could be recorded. The Tivo Box is a little better, but very clumsy and fiddly. Whilst there is great choice on demand, the practicality of getting to is a real mission. The planner is also messy - recordings are dotted about and not easy to view. Again, it's slow compared to Sky and freezes often. I have Sky myself and after trying Virgin, I wouldn't dream of changing. Granted it's a little more money each month, but it's so simple to use, i've never had an issue. Virgin Broadband? Yes, Virgin Media? Avoid like the plague.

I placed an order with virgin for their full kahuna, tv, broadband and telephone line. I had to cancel my existing contract with BT (they will disconnect t'row 16-04-2015). I have three teen aged kids sitting GCSE and A level exams, my wife and myself doing HND Business and need to submit our assignment in couple of days. Virgin were supposed to intall their service today 15-04-2015, an engineer showed up this morning and said someone else was supposed to have come and provide a live wire in the socket. He further said that he will come back later on today and fix everything. No one from Virgin bothered to give me a courtesy call to let me know what is happening. I called twice, first time around 2 pm, was told someone will turn up by this evening and installation will gonahead. Second time I called @9:20, pm, no one knows what is going on. At this rate I will have no choice but to go back to BT, terrible customer service, terrible service, NOT a reliable or good company! Will NEVER recommend anyone!

Having been with sky and virgin together over the years, I feel qualified to voice an opinion on both. My first is with sky, never had a real problem with customer service, although with virgin I have had trouble with overseas call centres. Now down to tv service etc, On sky again the only problems were recently with slow on demand progs, which sky blamed my broadband for. This is with virgin, sky had the audacity to tell me virgin were slowing me down and they (sky)suggested I go with them. After telling them I did not believe virgin would commit suicide by doing this, I decided to end my sky deal which was out of contract. I have now uprated my tv on my virgin box from a low package to a big one. Now the trouble starts, ALL my utilities are with virgin, but I still have trouble watching anything on the tivo box on bbc i player.. this according to their forum is an ongoing problem which has been going for over 12 mths.. 12MONTHS!! How much do we customers have to take??? ALL I WANT IS GOOD TV, BROADBAND AND PHONE AT REASONABLE COST AND WORKING AND FIT FOR PURPOSE.

I have contacted the top three companies for a new TV & Broadband deal, Virgin are miles behind the other two, I like using the chat agent pages, easy to copy and make notes about the packages. Today I asked the agent which English Premier league games ESPN show if any?, He responded by telling me that if I wanted the EPL I should pay for the Sky Sports package(this is £40 a month extra) I told him I did not want this option I just wanted to know if ESPN broadcast's EPL as there is mention on their website but its down on your package as one of the two main sport channels available in the deal, the other channel being BT SPORTS, He then told me - You will get all the EPL games with the Sky Sports Collection.However, you will get some of them on ESPN. I asked how many, He responded with 38 games, I said are you sure you are not talking about BTsport? he said no, then he sent me a link which included a list of games on BTsport, I asked if it was his first day and he sent me a generic apology, I then asked again how many live games if any would be showed on ESPN, he failed to respond, I got another generic apology and then his manager came onto the screen,he/her failed to answer the same question and responded with boredom in her/his reply, I said I am been told by them that Espn & BTSport are both showing 38 live Premier league games, have asked him several times he is adamant that this is the case, meaning those two channels are offering 76 games, this is a form of mis-selling, they were not interested but sent me the same generic apology that they had sent twice at the start of the call, I asked to speak to the complaints department and they told me I would have to write a letter as they don't allow emails, maybe years ago you could get away with this but in 2014 Virgin are blantantly avoiding people's complaints because they know most people do not use the postal service to complain unless it is something serious.This all happened a moment before I was about to agree to a contract that pays them £1500 of two years, I dumbfounded by the low level service and knowledge from the Virgin Media reps, I would not recommend getting involved with them.

they are fine until you leave. moved to a house where virgin was not available. I rang and cancelled my agreement with them and specifically asked what my final bill was and paid that amount. 2 months later they are chasing me for another final bill and no one seems to be able to listen to the call I made to the customer services which tells me my final bill amount. all iv had is rude incompetent staff ring me for something don't owe. do not touch this company

I will keep this quite brief as there are really only a couple of issues I have with virgin media and the first one and the most important one for me has to be loyalty. I have been with the service since the days of NTL and have been a loyal customer I think now for about 14 years, so it was quite upsetting to hear for the last 6 years I have been paying £56 per month for Virgin + downstairs and normal virgin upstairs only to find a friend of mine has joined with everything I have plus the new Tivo service and yet he is paying over £15 a month less ! - Surely in this day and age it is important to keep your current customers happy as well as trying to find new ones... I felt totally ripped off so made a phone call which resulted in them reducing the price.. obviously something they could have informed me about, - a bit crafty I think. Anyway the second thing is actually the new Tivo service... its awful. firstly it hasnt worked properly since install and upon calling the same day it was installed (monday the 5th of Aug) I was told the earlier appointment would be Friday.. this is hours after it being installed, live TV not working apart from about two channels, can only get catchup. The second thing is the actual user interface.. how awful. its messy, complicated and slow I actually much prefer the previous standard box interface! Well that's my rant over, and I guess I didn't keep it short after all. My advice though, if you get tivo installed dont let the engineer fob you off that the live channels take time to download... they do but make sure he waits because if it doesnt work you will be without tv probably for the best part of a week. Rant definitely over!

Had to move a house. Sutton to Milton Keynes. Called Virgin to transfer my services. They told me that I can not have my fiberoptic internet connection as it is not awailable in MK and also can not have my phone package! 2 services i had from them and I couldnt have a single one of them! Was made to pay a cancellation fee of almost £200! In desperatin I made a deal with Virgin to get the new tennant in Sutton to sign up with them and that they will wave off the cancellation fee.....tennant did sign up and I had to pay ANYWAY! Shocking and very upsetting!

I noticed when channel hopping last night that Virgin Media no longer provides the ESPN sports channels to its customers. I didn't watch it very much, just the occasional live football match, but what struck me was the total lack of any note of apology or regret from Virgin Media in the on screen message which simply read 'We've said goodbye to ESPN. ESPN channels are no longer available on Virgin TV' Virgin gave a web address for more information so I logged on. Again no note of apology basically just a message that to me read 'You don't get ESPN from us any more, don't think for a moment that you will get a price reduction because of this, just be grateful that we give you British Eurosport' To make matters worse this morning I received my monthly bill. Against the monthly TV charge it states 'Did you know you get all this with Virgin TV - 175 Channels including .... ESPN' The Virgin TV service is generally okay and I would go so far as to say their broadband is good, what lets this company down is their total lack of customer focus. Like all the Virgin companies they have become complacent and arrogant and have come to think we should feel privileged that we are allowed to purchase their services. I've already quit Virgin Active because I'd had enough of their anti-customer culture. Virgin Media are next on the list to go.

I have been a user of virgin media since the NTL days and I have to say the actual service is fantastic with minimum issues. There content on the on-demand service is good and the download speeds for the internet are excellent. The issue I have is the cost. Over the last few years the cost has crept up and I was disappointed to hear that loyal customers seem to be getting a worse deal to new subscribers! I cant for the life of me think why their marketing department think this is a good idea and am sure it must be affecting customer retention. A friend of mine has two tivo boxes all the services I have and is paying £10 less than myself with no tivo box. Hope someone reads this and takes a view to looking after current clients.

I could not use Virgin Media's online TV service without taking Virgin's own broadband, so I decided to leave and go to Sky instead, where they don't have that requirement. I actually have their business broadband, but that does not count to qualifying for the online TV service. When eventually, I managed to get through on the phone to tell them I wanted to leave, the call centre 'resource' lied to me, saying that Sky had the same requirement. Well, they don't, but it wasted another hour of my time finding out and then calling Virgin again. Another problem is that when you leave, you are required to return the equipment, or else you can be held liable at some uncertain point in the future. First they said they would send packaging to send the V+ box back. Nothing arrived. Then I arranged for them to collect. No one came. I am still trying to get rid of it. I have wasted a lot of time leaving Virgin. I am certainly never going back. This may be a flawed system, or it may be a deliberate policy of dirty tricks. Certainly the deliberate lie that I was told about Sky can't be put down to a mistake in the system.

I've had so many technical problems with my tv service I can't even begin to list them. In general, it has taken months of infuriating phone calls to get them fixed. Sometimes, as I'm holding the line on yet another 20 minute call to try to get a problem fixed, I wonder how they get away with it. Of course: Virgin media have monopoly control over cable services in my area. If I could, I would have changed to another provider years ago. It is a disgrace that the government allowed companies to cash in by owning a particular market.

Often the fibre optic will rapidly decrease to unsupportable rate for playback through iplayer, and general internet usage. Spoken to one of their engineers and he says that there are offices in the area, high usage. Hampstead village? Plus often get the bill wrong.

Me and a friend got Virgin's Tivo box package installed at his house last year. Things were fine for the first month and a half. Things went very quickly down hill after that. I tried to cancel the direct debit after 2 months what they don't tell you is if you cancel the direct debit they cut you off which was happened to us! Rung them and they said if I didn't pay it there and then they would not reconnect and when it was paid It took 3 hours for services to resume! 2 months later my friend's contract was up on his house so we decided to get a flat together. Rang virgin to sort out moving the services and that was when everything went wrong. The tried to charge us £80 to move the service or £180 to cancel it. We refused to pay either charge as we couldn't see why we should have to pay for a service we were already paying for or to cancel a contract which was being terminated by no fault of our own. They could not provide the service we had signed for why should we pay a cancellation charge! 3 months later 180 bill has been removed but we have balifs chasing us for 36.19! Which again is a joke! Never get virgin media installed! Oh and customers services were not very helpful either. We kept getting told different things off different people!

I'm not a gadget geek. I'm not a computer addict. I'm not a gamer, a movie buff or a chatterbox on the telephone. I love chocolate, work in fashion, and all I want is to be able to switch on my TV at the end of the day and watch what I've recorded, or go online and check out the social network sites. Virgin Media enables me to do this. I opted for a broadband and Tv package, including TiVo. Having had Sky in the past, I wondered if I would cope with the transition to TiVo, but I'm a convert. There's plenty of memory space, so I don't have to worry that I'll run out of space for my series links. Also, being able to record upto 3 things at the same time, whilst watching a 4th recording can be a godsend when my partner and I are having issues over what to watch. The signal has never been affected since I've had it either. The broadband works excellently. My partner is able to download an album from iTunes within 4 minutes, and it can cope with a Xbox Live game in one room, whilst I pin things on Pinterest on the lap top in the other room. I can't really review the customer service, having only spoken to someone when I first ordered the package. They were, however, very polite and helpful in helping me choose a package, and didn't push me into getting extras that I didn't want or need, like a telephone line, or Sky Sports Big thumbs up!