VM are Totally Clueless
I was a VM victim - sorry - "customer" - for several years since moving out of London. The only way to get a tolerably speedy service appeared to be VM. The clowns in their local shop claimed that they provided "fibre internet" - they don't. They have some FTTC, but most of their network is just run over the cheapest, nastiest coax they could find. The ratty old pieces of coax in our neighbourhood would fail almost daily, with random outages sometimes lasting for hours. I was supposed to be on their "M350" service, but seldom got "down" data rates of more than 45 Mb/s. I pointed out several times that I could get better than this with cheap 'n' nasty ADSL, and each time I complained they claimed to have "fixed" the problem. I would get marginally improved data rates for a day or two, and then we'd return to the same old slow, unreliable rubbish.
Because I was frequently out of the country, I didn't have the time or inclination to complain further. However three events meant that I cancelled my "service" from this crowd immediately and am seeking significant financial redress from them....
Firstly - we lost all service for over a week.
Secondly - service was restored (sort of) and after a few days there was a lightning-induced spike down their (obviously unprotected) cable that blew up their Router ("Hub"), destroyed my telephones, wrecked the ethernet cards and the power supplies in three of my computers, and left a lingering smell of burnt electronics from my fried ethernet switches..... I got off lightly - my neighbour had three TVs and most of his household wiring destroyed, along with his fusebox, gas boiler, and virtually everything connected to mains sockets in his house!
VM (of course) deny liability, but they didn't know that lighting protection has been a part of my engineering remit since the 1970s.....
Thirdly - "City Fibre" ran fibres around the town, and covered my address.
I immediately cancelled VM (their "minimum period" expired some time ago), and four days later, was connected to Zen. I now get a symmetrical service at around 980 Mb/s with almost unmeasurably fast ping times at slightly less than half the monthly extortion that VM used to apply. I also discovered that they don't restrict IP addresses at all (unlike VM's Bowdlerised "service"), and they don't sell details of my browsing habits to "Phorm".
I got the infamous "Final Bill" from VM for some arbitrarily high figure (in the low hundreds). I counter-billed them for the destruction of my equipment and have given them 28 days to pay. If they fail to pay up (and I'm sure they will), my Barrister brother will take them to the cleaners....
I must also add that any attempt to phone up VM "Customer Services" is either answered by someone who can't speak or understand English, answered by a clueless Scottish woman with a bad attitude, or just get endless recorded messages telling me just how important my call is to them followed by some distorted "music" obviously intended to deter persistent callers......
When I cancelled, I received a phone call from their "Retentions Department" offering a monthly reduction of 70p, and when I pointed out that this was derisory, was threatened with "Disconnection Charges" and "Equipment Retrieval Charges".
The sooner this crowd of criminals goes out of business, the better!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
