Great broadband shame about the call centres.

This review covers Virgin Media broadband and telephone.

I'll start with the broadband service itself. Here I have no complaints. In five years of use we have only had scheduled outages for the broadband, for which we have had notice in advance. One phone issue, solved in a few days and we use our mobiles for calls so the landline is not really an issue. It's the same price with or without the phone when I come to contract renewal. For some reason they seem keen to keep phone customers.

With broadband, there is a caveat. I use the Virgin Media hub in modem mode. Routing & firewalling is done using a mini PC running a Linux distro and I use industrial grade wireless networking kit from Ubiquiti for our WiFi, so not your usual setup. That being the case I cannot comment on the Virgin Media hub as a router and Wifi box.

I have had no issues with port blocking and no problems with either incoming or outgoing VPN connections.

My beef is with the overseas call handling. The last contract renewal call kept getting routed to somewhere in the Indian sub-continent and the communication barrier was so bad they may as well have been using their native language.

Again I am not the average caller as I have a hearing problem (tinnitus) that for me means that if people speak too quickly, the words become a jumble of noise. Now that can happen with native English speakers but try as I might I could not make sense of what Virgin Media's overseas operators were saying. I suspect they are under pressure to keep call times short and so they rattle through whatever script they are reading and that combined with their accent makes for unintelligible gibberish. It took a couple of calls to get an operator who, if they spoke slowly enough, could just about be understood. Even then I kept having to ask for them to repeat their last sentence, which makes for a long call.....

So, Virgin Media. Your broadband service is reliable but your customer is absolutely abysmal, especially for those with hearing difficulties.

Finally, price. They are not cheap but having had endless problems with Openreach technicians keep borrowing our wire pair to fix other people's problems when we had broadband over their network, I consider the additional cost of Virgin Media to be justified. Phone and broadband costs me £32 at the time of writing, which is a tenner more than introductory offers from providers using Openreach, but what price do you put on your time if you are constantly having to complain because some idle technician has used your wires to fix another issue, and all the while your internet connection is off.

Yes you can use a laptop and a mobile as a wireless modem but that's a temporary solution to unreliable broadband. I will stump up the extra for reliability.

Would I recommend it? Maybe. If you have OpenReach issues and Virgin Media is available then Yes. If you have had no wiring issues in the past with Openreach then no as their 60+ Mbs service is plenty fast enough for home use and can be had much cheaper.