Because geek is cool and clever

A nice little earner February 28, 2009

Sometimes this column gives tips; sometimes this column gives advice; and rarely this column gives a resounding warning that readers will fail to heed at their peril.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we find ourselves at the latter stage. This is Def Con Three. I implore you to avoid all distractions and to fully digest the following statement.

Do not sign up to Virgin Media’s broadband service.

What follows is more than a personal whinge about a one-off experience. I have it from the horse’s mouth that the company is continuing to sign people up for a service it knows it cannot hope to provide. It will take your money and leave you wanting.

In my book that’s called a scam.

Here’s what is happening. Virgin Media is currently engaged in an aggressive advertising campaign in Oxford and elsewhere where it is praising fibre optic cabling and its newly available 50Mbps broadband service. As you might expect from such a campaign, it is receiving a significant number of new customers.

The cable modem that Virgin installs in your house works by making a physical connection between itself and Virgin’s nearest data exchange. These exchanges contain things called Universal Broadband Routers (UBR) which are, in turn, connected directly to the internet.

Each UBR has a maximum capacity which you can think of just like the router in your house. The more computers that connect to it, the slower the connection becomes for each of those computers.

Virgin Media is taking on more customers than it has UBRs to support them, making internet access very much slower than promised or, at certain times, non-existent.

My ‘up to’ 20Mbps line was installed last Wednesday and over four days my connection fluctuated around the 2Mbps level. Engineers came and went before finally admitting the problem with the oversubscribed UBRs. Virgin itself will give no date for when more UBRs will be introduced, thus increasing the capacity.

When accounts are placed the company does not check the current capacity on the line, preferring to just keep adding more and more people to it and taking £30 or £50 a month for a service it likely cannot provide.

My account is now cancelled and Virgin Media won’t get a penny of my money. I will also be contacted Trading Standards.