Well I finally got round to calling BT for a MAC code and I got transferred 3 times but I did get hold of a very helpful chap who got the call sorted quickly. But he did try to get me to stay and was able to reduce my bills by half!!!! £15 per month for option 3. But he couldn't compete with O2's static IP address, I guess they don't do them unless you are on business package.

Mainly I was surprised with the amount they were able to reduce it by, especially when I complained that they changed my direct debit amount with no notice and all I got was "sorry it wont happen again". But as soon as I was going to leave they can do something.

What's the best offer you've had when leaving or attempting to leave a service provider?

Also when leaving BT for O2 - £23/month down to £7.49/month (price matched with O2).

I told them to get stuffed anyway - if they really wanted my business then they should have tried harder to start with, rather than making vague promises and reducing my bill when I try and leave. Too little too late.

I might be trying something similar with Pipex shortly. The last week has not been a glowing one for their support & tech. teams.

We got Virgin round to install a new connection yesterday. The engineer left just after 9am and said there are technical difficulties in the area, and the connection may not work for an hour or so.

My housemate called the customer service line at 2pm to see if anything could be done and he got a recorded message saying that the call centres were experiencing technical difficulties and couldn't take calls!

i once had a rather fascinating talk with someone from carphone warehouse, who had just bought tiscali(current) at the time

he was able to give me a worse deal than what i had with tiscali, and he wanted to give me a bt line for extra charge, i told him that tiscali had just been bought by said company, and he didnt know, nor could he give me a better deal

complete and utter TWAT

To the aformentioned twat: You are a twat. You twat.

I ended up having a fun argument with the thinking about leaving Virgin thing the other week. We had a 1mb package for like 2 years straight, and it was bang on. Not even any downtime all the time I used it!

We upgrade to 8mb and its either unbearably slow, down all the time or "engineers are working on the line" three times a month. So we phoned and whined to them, got upgraded to 10mb and its a bit stabler.

I'm looking to change my BB package too.

It's a big ask, I want a low price, decent speed and and healthy bandwidth allowance.

I may just try the threaten to leave approach, and see if Plusnet cave in.

When leaving 3 (mobile network) I was offered a Nokia N97 as a replacement to my godsawful E65.

I told him that I had already joined T-Mobile because of the G1 phone, and that I don't think the N97 is as good as the G1.

His words exactly.

"I know it is not good as G1, but the N97 is much better phone".

>.<

Lol when I was leaving T-mobile and heading over to O2 for the iphone 3gs, the guy tried playing on the 'exploding iphones' stories that had been coming out and tried to flog me T-mobile's version.

Well I have finaly been switched over, and I am now enjoying a 37.5% increase in speed. I used to get 8meg and now I get 11meg. Good times

BT are just being a pain, there seems to be speed caps until about 11pm and they're charging us for the "Up to 20mb or so" connection when: a) Our phone number says we can only get around 3Mb max" and b) Our download speed is pretty shocking (350KB/sec max) compared to my friend who lives on the next road along (like less than 100m away) and regularly gets 700KB/sec and is on a much lesser package.

We're trying to move over to Virgin after considering other options (Sky etc.) however they aren't being very helpful either (you'd have thought that you wanting to sign up would make them more helpful but obviously not it seems). We were looking at the whole TV, Phone and Broadband option since the former seems like an alright replacement for our Sky, we don't use the phone much and the Fiber-Optic connection for Broadband should mean we get much better speeds, since my dad works from home quite regularly, or at least is on call for support quite a lot of the time, the 50MB/sec package looked rather tempting, especially with its lack of download caps, traffic management and dedicated line (iirc).

So you'd think trying to apply for the highest BB package would make them want your custom right? But Virgin beg to differ. I understand that although their BB speed checker thing said our house wasn't in a Fiber Optic area, our neighbour's address (as in next door) *is* valid for Fiber Optic. Not to mention that our neighbour's had Cable since the NTL days and we had an NTL cable person come round an confirmed that the cable hatch (and what i assume is the Fiber Optic hatch) is located right outside our driveway (literally, 2 feet from the end of it).

With all of that information i thought it would have been fairly simple to have them at least come confirm that it was possible for us to have Fiber-Optic and put us on the system but not only did the people we talk to not understand the main point (i.e the hatch is right outside our house and your system hasn't been updated), when we did get round to actually understanding each other we were forwarded (from a person) to what turned out to be some automated rubbish that asked for our details and that "a local company/seller person thingy" would get in touch with us soon...

It's been over a week with no reply and according to the rest of the web, it seems like we could be waiting for a rather long time indeed. I really don't understand how they expect to do business to be fair, especially when compared to the rather excellent service i got from Sky when setting up TV and BB in my Uni apartment.

The problem is, providing broadband to the home is not always easy. If it's over your BT lines, these are often 40 year old bits of rotten copper which just don't work at the radio frequencies they were never designed for. It's all down to luck.

Then there's the profit margin. Everyone wants broadband for a few pennies. Laying a new fiber costs a lot of money - even if the guy that digs the hole is on minimum wage! The profit for cable comes from the TV services which people pay a lot more for. If you just want broadband, then you're not a profitable customer. Especially if you actually use it and clog up the backbone!

We can only make a profit from customers who don't download much. We can only offer good ADSL service to customers who happen to have a nice piece of copper. If you don't, then you need to move house or pay us £10,000 to lay new cable.

VM's service itself is reasonably good (IME), but their staff overall leave a lot to be desired (IME)

I had problems with Virgin when I moved house. As you say you would have thought that they would be desperate to get customers

In the end I wrote to the Chairman of VM (NOT Richard Branson) a letter – not e-mail – complaining

Within a couple of days I had someone from his office call me, gave me a dedicated person to speak to ( so no need to go via the normal system) and 6 months at XL the Package for free

Since then the only real issue I had was when i lost the phone line but that was a corroded wire in my box on the outside wall that they replaced within a week

I went into the local branch of the Virgin Media outlet and explained the situation to them, it was a lot better face to face and the guy seemed a lot more welcoming or at least, down to earth.

Unfortunately as it was only a sales outlet there wasn't actually anything he could do apart from put my name down on the engineer call list, however the fact i saw him type in the application and submit it, i'm a little more reassured than merely recording my details on the phone and expecting someone to take action.

Ultimately if they still don't do anything within the month i'd probably consider your route.