Virgin Media... Really? What does BROKEN sound like?

Virgin Media. This all singing and dancing 100mph Superhub

is BROKEN.

During Black Friday a week or so ago I was tempted away from my current supplier of Broadband as we were paying what i considered to be a whopping £47.50 a month - just for broadband and a phone line we have to have but never use.

we had a download speed of 72mb which is high but we have 3 kids which live on the internet streaming and apparently we use 12x the internet of the average household.

Vodafone were offering similar for £25 plus £60 set up.

I rang Virgin - what could they do? - Their answer not a lot - although they could offer 100mbps download speed for £39.99 a month. I didn't wnat the kids to become reliant on anything more than they already were and I wanted to reduce my bills so I declined their offer and signed up with Vodafone.

Once done, I rang Virgin to give them 30 days notice of cancellation - Virgin, not pleased by my decision to leave them then started to make the offers they should have mode before. I was offered the same package for £34.99 that I was already on. I was on the damn phone for 30 minutes while they faffed about. I told them it was too late - I had signed up elsewhere I was now here to give notice. It was at this point they said they could offer me a new superhub (which apparently although I was paying £47.50 a month I did not have). The woman said 'You will need to return your current hub for us to recycle'.  Then she added 'OH - NO - er you don't need to return it - we don't recycle THOSE hubs, that one is over five years old - just take it to your recycling centre.'

So we'd been paying £47.50 a month for a five year old hub, although as far as I knew it worked fine. From their point of view though it was so prehistoric they didn't even want it back to recycle - that made me feel like we had really had value for money. Not! I was passed from one department to the other until I became very cross. I left my 30 day notice and that was it.

Or so I thought... Ten days AFTER I had given notice to leave, Virgin rang AGAIN and made more offers - they made me a better offer than Vodafone and despite what they say it is a hassle to change over - what with engineers coming and taking days off work and changing phone numbers (we had this issue last time we changed) and set up fees and everything else, we decided to stick with Virgin. They said they would send a superhub. Great.

Superhub duly arrived and when it came out of the box it sounded like there was a large loose metal object inside. This large loose metal object had various other small glass sounding objects rattling around with it.

I rang Virgin. I rattled the Superhub down the phone, explained that although I was no expert, this was not going to work.
The guy on the phone said 'Thank you for calling Wirgin Media, I will be wery happy to 'elp you wiz zis issue. Please let me be taking your details.'
We went through security and then I explained again that I needed him to send another hub. I though he understood until he said 'Let me have the code from the side so I may actiwate it for you'
What? I told him I didn't want it 'actiwated' as it was clearly broken. If he actiwated it then it wouldn't work and to add to the fun neither would the old one which he would have just de-actiwated.

This took some explaining and I got my hair off a little bit with him. He then told me 'Don't worry please - nothing bad happened nobody died.' (I had to laugh - I've done the call centre thing myself). He said he could send an engineer out. I didn't want an engineer - no engineer would even attempt to fix an electrical object which sounded like it had been run over by a truck - that would be foolish. I got nowhere. A new hub would take 10 days to arrive, an engineer would be here in 3 days.

I went with the engineer.

Engineer arrived, rolled his eyes when I rattled the hub at him. Got a new one from the van and now we're up and running - although to be fair I can't see any difference from the old one.