.....when Virgin will phorm-alise matters then?

Why should I have to pay to report a fault to them?

They say they refund calltime when it's a problem at their end, but they always blame your own hardware or just tell you to sit it out.

I think they're just trying to smokescreen the current Phorm issue with this though.

"We have been working hard to improve customer service and listening to what our customers say, so will now be removing this charge from the outset."

How about no fucking Phorm, then?

Twats.

You're almost two weeks early with this one! Save it for April 1st.

Virgin media actually improving customer service? Come on, you won't catch many out with that.

"An email doing the rounds inside VM says the move last summer to discourage irrelevant calls to the broadband support line has not gone down well."

Well spank my ass and call me Kirsty! You mean they didn't see this coming? Just like they didn't see the anti-Phorm backlash? Oy vey... There's a simple rule here they haven't realised - if you're going to charge premium rate for something then it needs to be worth it. Paying through the nose for someone who has trouble understanding an English accent following a script and telling you to do things you've already done isn't worth premium rate charges.

The moment I mention I'm a Windows free household and running Linux I always seem to get put on hold or passed around.

"We have been working hard to improve customer service and listening to what our customers say, so will now be removing this charge from the outset."

Does that mean they'll be kicking Phorm out as well then?

<...>This year, one of our key aims is to delight our customers by improving customer service - and boy are we serious about it," <..>

Free Customer Service *and* Webwise. We are already delighted - keep it coming VM.

'A Virgin Media spokesman said today: "Whilst calls to the premium rate broadband support line are already refunded when there has been a fault with our network, perhaps that wasn't clear.'

Yeah, right. You try getting your money back. If all the reports at ThinkBroadband are to be believed the standard VM response is either to not admit it is there fault then have the problem "fix itself by magic" (tm) [no refund] or to tell you you will get a refund that never appears.

A couple of months ago I rang tech support to get the PIN for my mate's new broadybandy (which I have to do EVERY BLOODY TIME* by the way).

The guy on the other end was constantly going on about how my call would be refunded, but to my mate's bill (I was on my own phone) and that I'd need to sort it out with him. I told him repeatedly that I couldn't care less about the cost of the call but he wouldn't shut up about it. I just wanted to get the PIN so I could get off the phone and happily carry on with being hungover.

I swear that took twice as long as it should have done because of it.

* has anyone actually seen these fabled connection details that the engineers are supposed to leave with you? After 5 installs in 3 years I am yet to receive one, necessitating a 15-minute telephone hoop-jump to get to the part where the screen tells them to give me the damn number. In fairness though, this time he did do as he was told and went straight for the "this guy knows what he's on about, give him the number" option, without demanding that I install the CD first. Thank god they brought back the automatic autoreg redirect - not that I ever stopped using it :-)

</rant>

They were charging 25p a minute to call some Uzbekiranistanislavian call centre and speak to a guy reading from a crib sheet who didn't understand what I was saying, instead opting to repeat what's on the screen.

Worst support EVER (and i've used MS's paid for support).

Rant Alert! I don't know about any of you, but calling the technical no-support line is like pulling teeth. First of all, the person who answers lives in bangalore, india and is so strongly accented it's difficult to understand them. Then when you get through to someone who speaks passable english, they take you through the same, bog standard checklist no matter the fault. "Can you reset the modem please" I'VE DONE IT TEN TIMES ALREADY!!!!!! GRRRR. Worth 25 pence a minute my left arse cheek. So by the time they finally acknowledge the problem is with them, you're on the phone for 25 mins for the simplest problem you told them in the first ten seconds! You're screwed if they're awkward and decide not to pay the call!

Virgin Media should be able to cover any money lost by doing this with the huge ammounts they are getting from Phorm for selling their users browsing habbits.

In fairness to VM though who I use, they did used to refund the call charges if the fault was at their end, or with their modem.

Is he for real?

So they make something worse last year, then bring it back to just the way it was before and expect us to be "delighted"?

I'm SO pleased I cancelled my account with them last month. Good riddance!

Mine's the one with the ADSL modem in the pocket :P

Every time I have called the 25p/min support line (4 times) the cost of the call has been refunded, because the problem has been their fault. I did not know this would happen before my first call, so I can see why people would be annoyed about the idea of having to pay to report a fault.

Just to add emphasis to the general sentiment...

------

"We have been working hard to improve customer service and listening to what our customers say..."

Does that mean they'll be kicking Phorm out as well then?

------

Amen

thank the lord i have now left virgin effing media and have a stable adsl connection (with sky just to rub it in!)

my adsl with vm was terrible, throttled at peak times to almost the bad old days of dial-up, ping of 200+, excessive downtime (usually for whole weekends) and then to rub it in the three times i bothered to ring them i was never refunded despite them admitting the problem was at their end!

the best bit is when i spoke to the gormless nerk to cancel my contract and stated the reason i was leaving was that i could never guarnatee getting online and that the helpline was rubbish he said i could have used the IM service or the online help... i'm sorry but i can't magically pull an internet connection out of my arse as much as they can pull good customer service out of theirs!

0845 ISN'T charged at the standard local rate - if it were then I would be able to call VM for free in the evenings! To be the same as a local call then I suggest their support number should be a geographical one. (Is there such a thing as a "local rate" any more - isn't it the same to make a call to your neighbour as it is to make a call to someone 200 miles away?)

I don't like premium rate numbers for tech support - I remember when freeserve had one and that was annoying as hell...

However, as Captain Jamie says "telling you to do things you've already done" - unfortunately the problem is that a lot of callers haven't already done that, they are the issue that a premium rate number aimed to solve.

I can imagine that you also didn't like the long waits on the line before you got to speak to someone - doubtless a large reason for this was because the phone operators were busy telling callers to 'try turning it off and back on again' and other assorted goodies.

The issue is that there are far too many people through either a lack of common sense, laziness, lack of knowledge or a combination of them all who would quicker pick up a phone to pester Virgin than try rebooting or whatever first. These are similar to the people that post questions on forums asking how to find out X when the first link on a google search for X spells out the answer plain to see.

People like this may potentially think twice if it was going to cost them 25p/minute. Maybe they'd think "Why should I pay 25p/min for someone to tell me to turn it off and back on again when I can do that now for free... oooh, f*ck me it worked". This leaves the lines free for genuine support calls to be given quicker attention. Let us not muddy this discussion with opinions on whether the call will glean any useful support as that is not the issue.

The fact that they will refund the call if the fault is theirs should be good enough for anyone with genuine issues to accept.

The other system goes like this:

Dummy: "Hi, I'm having a problem with X'

Op: "Have you tried rebooting"

Dummy: "No, I haven't, shall I do that now?"

Op: "That would be good, yes, do you know how to do that?"

Dummy: "Yes, it's rebooting now"

...

Dummy: "Oh wow! That fixed it, thanks a lot"

Op: "That's no problem, the service charge will appear on your next bill as 'f*ckwit fee'."

Dummy: "But I thought this was free?!?"

Op: "Well, yes, that's true for genuine support calls. Have a nice day now, goodbye"

Dummy: "Ok. Bye"

--------------------------

One thing is almost certain, Dummy will only ever see 'f*ckwit fee' on his bill once...

Maybe instead of playing lift music and telling us how much they value our call, they could instead say "While you are waiting, you may like to do such things as rebooting your problematic PC, stopping kazaa, ensuring that your network cable is firmly inserted into the correct slot on your PC....." - potentially this would weed out timewasters?

Paris, because even she knows that 25p/min is too much to waste on nonsense support calls....

This is the new trend: "Don't give something to customers that you haven't already taken off them"

So customers are supposed to be delighted by the fact that a service they were once used to is being returned to them. Funny, it makes me think of now popular lines like "Go with our car insurance/bank/telco/directory services because we use UK-only call centres". WOW, amazing. Hang on, that's how it used to be before some accountant realised there was margin to be had by offshoring at the expense of customer satisfaction. Mind you, never let little things like that get in the way of shareholder return.

Mines the one with 'Bah' written in big miserable letters on it.

"Paying through the nose for someone who has trouble understanding an English accent following a script and telling you to do things you've already done isn't worth premium rate charges."

Well said, Sir! I recall the time I called to report what I suspected was an area wide fault. "Oh, we have had no reports of a fault Sir.... Yes, lots of people have been calling to complain about this same thing, but we have had no reports of a fault." Arse!

Oh Gawwwwwd... what cunning plan are they about to pull now? Increase in their package prices? Call charges going up? Or is old Branston tits feeling a little bit hot under the collar?

To be honest, they need to get rid of their two bit overseas "Read from the script, not around the script" operations and get their management to sort their lives out.

Paris - cos she could do a better job than them twunts.

It exists? Well phuck me.

About time too!

Although, what are the chances of actually speaking to someone who knows what they're talking about now? Considering VM used a bunch of script-reading monkeys that had been trained on the cheap whilst they were fleecing us for 25p p/minute, I think it's even less likely we'll get to speak to someone who can correctly diagnose an issue on their own if we're not paying through the nose for their so-called technical support line.

At least now I won't be spending a fortune whilst pretending I don't have a router and that my Linux box is booting into safe mode whilst I'm unable to do anything with my uber-expensive broadband.

Off topic, but has everyone else received a marketing leaflet through their doors saying that VM's fibre optic broadband is faster than a speeding bullet? I wasn't aware that the cable-equivalent of the last mile from their little green box (which seems to have rather dodgy doors or maybe they've lost the keys) to my house is actually fibre optic, any more so than my BT line is.

Oh, and I had to select the Tux icon because, contrary to what I tell VM's tech support line, I do use it at home!

I used to work for AT&T and Comcast doing tech support. I understand the idea of stupid calls coming into the support desk, but the real problem was that they would let managment decide who gets put in the "Special Queues" which in a lot of cases meant that people with actual computer knowledge was left behind while KISS-A$$ people got bumped up and could only read off scripts.

When I started with them you had to have post-secondary schooling and experience. They pissed off that many employees that within 3 years they would accept people who only had some high-school education, with "some" experience.

But thanks to these companies I will always have a job going out to peoples houses fixing what thier engineers fubar'd

> I used to work for AT&T and Comcast doing tech support.

Sorry, we'll talk a bit slower then....

I used to work in the old Telewest callcenter and we did spenmd around 75% of the time dealing with customers issues with malware, viruses, operating systems issues that had absolutely nothing to do with the broadband service. And yeah we did have messages on the phones asking people to reboot everything before phoning through - but they never listened.

Anyway - all the latest broadband service ratings that have been coming out have shown Virgin slipping down the ratings so they clearly need to do something. They are also currently advertising for ITIL Problem/Incident/change managers to replace the Telewest ones that got made redundant 18 months ago when NTL took over. So it goes.

I used to work for them when they were Telewest, early summer is when their reports go off to the stockholders etc. They are VERY nice to customers round about then, because they don't want you to disconnect. If you DO, their trick is to leave your account running, and credit you back the costs to keep their churn down...

It would have been a boner to be charged when you report some spyware is intercepting my traffic!!!!

Boy I wish I could put a 25/min phone line in for members of my family.

Perplexed Relative: "My broadband doesn't work."

Me: "Have you called [insert ISP of choice here]?"

Perplexed Relative: "No I thought I'd bother you for six hours first to see if you can fix what is clearly a none working ADSL line."

Me: "Sorry, you had better call your ISP, I don't have keys to the exchange."

Perplexed Relative: "Whats an exchange?"

[Insert 6 hour conversation explaining the difference between routers, exchanges, phone lines, modems, browsers, operating systems, outlook express, outlook, office, word, cookies, SSL, why you can use broadband at the same time as calling someone, what a microfilter is, why you need it on every device plugged into the phone line and finally giving them the phone number for the ISP]

Perplexed Relative: "So you think I should call the ISP then?"

Me: "Yes I think you should call the ISP"

I can imagine that interchanges similar to these, only explaining that the reason that they can't log in to their online banking is because their over zealous brother in law set IE's security settings to High and its blocking the banks cookies and no matter how they explain that the line is connected, bbc news page is coming up so its not a problem with Virgins broadband could convince them of the simple fact.

I don't envy anyone that works in support for anything, unfortunately, they are selling a product to numpties that requires a little bit of knowledge that most people plain don't have.

Good luck to em, thats what I say.

Mines the one with "Old and tired of IT" written on the back.

Never really had a problem getting the charges refunded, although they never offered to do so but the threat of a complaint has always spurred them into action.

Next step is to move the call centres out of india and actually employ techies that have a vague interest in IT.

Well, just a little heads up on the ADSL for all of us outside of their cabled areas...

I've had an ongoing "experience" with VM since the middle of September... Turns out I have been capped pretty much everyweek since then. VM never admitted it, so reported it to ISPA. Next day, a very nice phone call from VM, an apology, offer to waiver the leaving fee and a refund for all the times I've been capped. If anyone else is having this same "experience" (10-20kB/s max between 4pm and midnight weekdays and all weekend) then may be worth talking with them...

AC as still trying to get it all finalised....

Having been a land-line and bb customer of VM for a couple of years without any issues I recently signed up to their 3 for £30 offer which is a deal that will save me £350 a year in real costs - no problem with that.

However, the key question when I phoned them was that I need to be able to use my phone in Europe and was met with the answer "no problem, as an existing VM customer there will be no issues". OK I thought and transferred my number across from Vodaprone.

So, number transferred... I try to phone a mate in Holland and get told the roaming bar needs to be lifted. Phone VM and ONLY THEN do I get told contrary to the sales bullshit that to use the phone internationally I need to have been with Virgin Mobile for either 3 months, or that I need to pre-load my mobile account with £150 of non refundable credit (i.e. 15 months of line rental).

Much arguing ensues with McJob callcentre bloke which culminates in me ordering him to get me someone higher in rank than a prole which finally, and very reluctantly he does. Luckily McSupervisior sorts it all out to my satisfaction but I have wasted an hour in time.

So the moral... they are cunning bastards, but if you stand up for yourself and make your demands clear then you can get a result.

RE VM and Phorm: I have sent a very clear request to VM for comment and will post the results when I have them... knowing the efficiency of their E service, this will probabaly be in 2010.

Keep up the fight.

It isn't their fault, though they are irritating.

The lovely shiny brochures, and the lovely shiny people, sent by the big offshore CRM players would have you believe that you can procure from them staff who speak English like natives, who understand regional dialect, who have excellent technical backgrounds. Prices start from only X rupees/day.

And it's all true. Only what you get for you "Prices start at" is some poor dufus they just pulled of the street. It turns out that, oddly enough, well spoken, technically competent people who speak multiple languages well, are quite expensive wherever in the world you try and source them from.

I once briefly worked for a very large (and I mean REALLY large) outsourcing shop who resisted offshoring for a long time because the cost benefit is only applicable when you are not concerned with the QoS.

We had a few mega global Blue Chip big bolox* clients who were certainly always prepared to negotiate on price, but never, ever, on quality. Because _their_ clients demanded it. And given that one of our banking clients' customers once overflowed our transaction routines because he purchased an island using Italian Lira, you're talking massive amounts of money per customer head if they take their business elsewhere. It pays to keep them.

Upshot was, there was no cost advantage to offshoring, as similar quality would have been almost as expensive per CSR head, plus all the administrative overhead from IT systems, flying people backwards and forwards to Elbonia or wherever, and so on.

Unfortunately, our £20 month doesn't carry quite so much weight, so it's the minimum wage script monkey in whatever country is cheapest at the moment.

Question though, do you think you would be getting better service from minimum wage script monkeys based in a UK call centre. Personally, I doubt it. In fact I know it's the case, since not all our clients were in the same league as the above mentioned.

* I can't say who, so I have added extra emphasis, they really were enormous, the clients, not the bollocks.

""We have been working hard to improve customer service and listening to what our customers say, so will now be removing this charge from the outset."

I really don't care what they do anymore. As soon as I read about the Phorm story I arranged for a new line with another provider. I hope they rot in hell (or at least go bust).

... that they'll also drop the draconian traffic management. Currently the network is unusable between 4pm and 9pm because of the fear of 5 hours of capping *every night* even with moderate downloads.

There's no point upgrading 4Mb customers to 10 if you never delivered 4!

The VM helplines do have a recorded message telling you to try switching off your Cable Modem or Set Top Box for 30 seconds while you're on hold. But once you do get through to a phone-jockey, the first thing instruction on the script is to switch off the CM/STB for 30 seconds.

These are the same people who told me that my CM and STB must have both suffered hardware faults when I simultaneously lost TV, Broadband and Phone services and the only solution was to send round an engineer, which I would be charged for if the equipment turned out not to be faulty! I told them to get stuffed and went on holiday for 2 weeks. When I got back, my "broken" hardware was magically fixed.

To be fair, that was the only significant loss of service I've suffered in 10 years of being a VM/NTL/BCM customer.

I have used the line 3 or 4 times, this was when I had my connection move between different rooms and kept losing conncetivity, each time it was quick to connect and the staff generally helpful (even if they were following a script) plus they call back if it takes a long time. On all occasion bar 1 I had the "call charges" refunded BUT I am on BT for phone and as such I have actualy ended up with a refund on my Cable BB account not my phone even though I asked them if my BT Line would be credted and they said "yes".

I can only assume the call centre in India also handle BT calls so got confused.

Still I am not too fussed either way, I would prefer a good service for a price with a refund where it is Virgin's fault than have to wait an hour to get through like before. If only they could refund my BT bill then I would be ecstatic.

Gordon Brown's put the chocolate ration up to ten grammes!

I issued a small claims court summons for £6. They settled out of court and paid the £30 court fee. How do you claim the 25p per minute back other than that? anyway, they didn't give me this option despite a faulty 8 year old cable modem. Other than that, I have to say VM are one of my best value utility suppliers, notwithstanding the appalling "Hey there! fancy a gobble?" type marketing literature they send out.

So back to the good old days of NTL of 40 minute waits on the phone, only to then be cut off ;-)

Face it, they're the same jokers right back to the days when they were known as CableTel. Doesn't matter what they're called, support still sucks.

their service is so miserable i've been planning to switch

their tech. support is clueless - they don't even know when outages are due to planned maintenance

their free recorded service status message is a nightmare, even when calling on a vm cable phone line you have to enter your phone number, you get a status message that usually doesn't say anything informative, then you get yet another round of "type 1 to have more of your time wasted" before you finally get a second completely different status message that if the lazy sods responsible for the shite service have been bothered to update might possibly confirm that yet again vm's service has failed to deliver

as for the perky bitch reading the canned messages, she's the last ffffing thing i need to hear when my service is down yet again

vm and good customer service are mutually exclusive

As a Virgin Media customer, I've been disgusted that when (as happens more often than I'd like) there is a fault on the line or the modem dies (I'm on my 3rd in under a year) then I have to phone a premium number just to report a fault.

And then I have to spend 10 minutes running through the things I've already run through, just to satisfy the customer support person.

And then I have to phone up when the next bill comes through to ask for them to refund the call charge, because they haven't necessarily managed to do that automatically.

I work in tech support - I know what it's like to have people phoning up for general training-type issues rather than to report faults, or just to complain about a known limitation of the product, or whatever. You just deal with it as courteously as possible, and try to keep those 'irrelevant' calls reasonably brief.

Called their tech support the other day to complain that I was getting way slower speeds than I'm paying for (~5Mb instead of 20Mb) only to be told "it's because you're using a firewall".

Strangely enough an hour or so later I was getting ~15Mb which has since gone back down to ~5Mb.

This coupled with the Phorm fiasco is about to loose them my custom!

Mine's the one with "Virgin have deflowered themselves" on the back, ta.

The idea of the "f**kwit fee" is very nice but isn't seen as good customer service. It would also be nice if customers could turn that around and charge Virgin Media for being ph**kwits.

I once closed a support call with comments about the user being more of a quarterwit than a halfwit and hard questions needing to be asked about their training and competence levels and got bollocked for it.

I offered a choice of other suitable descriptives ranging from the basic "retard" through to the completely politically incorrect "drooling window licker" and maybe beyond but the manager wasn't having any of it.

When the managing director subsequently did a presentation where he claimed all of his staff were "intelligent clients" I had to excuse myself so I could go somewhere and laugh myself incontinent.

Bottom line is that whatever support service you run, you will always get a number of calls about stuff you don't support. With me it was company directors and AOL software on their personal laptops. It's how you respond to those calls that's important (in those cases "pop to the sports shop up the road and buy a G-10 repeater. Load it up and give the laptop plenty. That will solve it." "Will it fix it?" "No but it will stop anyone else suffering at AOL's hands!").

Script readers, wherever they are, will struggle to deal with issues like that because it is outside of their function. To quote the Cyberleader from "Silver Nemesis".

And these days I'm either a freelance writer or a rhubarb farmer to anyone I meet.

Mine's the coat saying "Is it me or are there lots of people being ar5eholes just lately?"

Some of the tech staff are clueless, but I've talked to a couple who were extremely good.

I've also had no problems at all getting my money back - key is to ask for it at the end of the call, not try to get it back later.

Agree about the mythical set-ups left by the engineers though - mine left nothing.

Also some of the engineers are cack - the 2nd one I had to correct the cock ups of the first one was ex-Telewest and was scathing about the quality of the ex-NTL ones.

This latest batch of comments has a distinctive flavour of anger/disgust/It's a Conspiracy! to it. The vulture is attracted to the smell of rotting carcass's. I just didn't think it was the readers!

If I am ever given a premium rate number to call I usually do a quick surf of the web and try all the 0800 numbers listed until I can find someone who will route me through. Doesn't always work but at least they are paying for my time wasting and perhaps losing important calls in the process.

What really pees me off is paying premium rate for access to an idiot whose accent is completely impenetrable and seems unable to understand my own or what I'm saying, and not least the prolonged "welcome" on calling which leaves me feeling like my wallet is being raped while I sit there; please choose one of the following seven options ...

Some companies seem to be seeing the light and are going back to 0800 numbers. Perhaps they have finally realised that it pays bucket-loads to have a customer call up who isn't angry and pissed off by the means of having to do that to start with ?

Paris : Who knows all about customer satisfaction.

Look up VM's numbers on saynoto0870.com and you should be able to find a geographical number for customer service. They have been blocking them off one by one but if you can find one it's well worth it (especially if you get free minutes on your mobile)

Well this just goes to show that the new CEO is commited in turning things around for Virgin Media and that changing to a premium rate number was the biggest mistake they ever made!!

ALL their staff kept saying this, ALL their customers said this and it had a really negative impact on the company as a whole, something the old CEO didnt have a clue about which is prob why he was shown the door...

I personally think that they should have a strict policy to stop time wasters, and if they call up with a computer related issue refer them to the 090 PC Helpline number no messing - keeps the call queues down!

No shit?

When I succumbed to the transfer from ADSL to cable, the "Engineers" were unable (they said) to install the cable due to it having to be routed through the kitchen.

"It might get wet" they explained, ignoring the fact that it was already crossing 20 feet of garden nailed to the wall. On the subsequent attempt, a supervisor directed every move until the cabling was complete.

The "Engineer" gave me a sealed box containing the modem and a CD and said I probably know more about how to set it up than he, then fled!

I was just leaving for an overseas trip and carefully circulated my e-mail address in case of problems and no sooner than I landed in Africa the Cnuts terminated my mail account.

Internationally, they told me that I could no longer have a Virgin address! I must change to NTLworld!!! despite me having set up a dial-up account to stop that happening. So no contact with the outside world for weeks until in desperation I bought my own domain.

I get home next week - does anyone have any constructive comments or actions to hit VM with?

I am warming to the idea of instigating bankruptcy proceedings and I've already done the 'Dozy Cnuts' bit.

I quit them last October and I can say VM has now deelighteed me. I gave them the reason for quitting being the phone charges for their faults. So this announcement has indeed delighted me, couldn't have been the only one then. eh?

Mind you, I've gone back to BT after a period of ten years and their still crap. Though a little bit less irritating than VM.

"will revert to a standard local rate 0845 number"

This is a telecoms company saying this - not some daft company that uses these numbers.

WTF are they on about? They have never charged the same for normal (local?) calls than they do for 0845.

C'mon Reg - you should be picking up on this, rather than just reprinting their tosh!

M

In about 12 months' time, you'll read that VM have decided to introduce a premium rate charge for broadband technical support. They'll be very apologetic about it though.

They will probably also lose customers, lose some managers, shift a few top knobs about, make some staff redundant, and have some service issues.

This is a company that never learns from its mistakes. It turns over so many staff that management knowing nothing about the past are convinced they are geniuses for coming up with the next stupid idea that didn't work a year ago.

You read it here first.

I've been with Bulldog broadband for about three years now. I pay £20 for broadband and £10 for phone line.

I'm an O2 customer and could get broadband for like dirt cheap but I just won't.

I NEVER EVER (its true) had a problem with broadband. Never went offline, never throttle, never slow speed.

i feel bad for all those VM customers.

... It was decided upon, and announced, about six months too late. The customers who've found it most offensive have either already left or have their minds set on leaving - when my contract is up in August, they'll have to give me a REALLY good deal to make me stay, otherwise it's right back to ADSL2+ again.

I've had too much poor service to merit staying with an ISP - 0845 is still a bit of a kick in the teeth. If they truly cared about customer service, they'd go for an 0844 (or even an 03 number).

I see this comming or just paraniod!

We change our phone support (Something you already want changed)

We send you the new Terms and Conditions (Becuase we change support)

We sneak in Spyware clause into the terms and conditions.

WHAT PART OF DO NOT WANT DONT YOU GET???

It's all very well them promising that the call fee will be refunded if its their fault. But recently I was forced to call the supportline when my broadband went off. Reason - because Customer Support refused to tell me over the phone if there was a fault in my area. As I couldn't access the status page on the web, I was forced to ring the payline. I have had this happen 2 or 3 times so far, and it's extremely annoying. Their attitude seems to be either you wait hours to see if it IS a fault and your internet comes back on, or you pay an arm and a leg to ring Bombay Central for advice half of us either find insultingly basic or have already tried as a matter of common sense.

I have always found cable (ex blueyonder) internet very good the sub contracted installers they use though, well thats another story

I used to work for VM it was never a case of detering unwanted calls to move to premium rate they had to generate new revenue to make up for how much money they needed to upgrade all their services. If they are bringing it back to an 0845 number then that means they have to save the money else where such as off shoring all the technical support rather than just 70% of it!