Digital Switchover and Early Disconnection Fee

[Telewestrefugee]

Having recently experienced the full horror of the Kafkaesque nightmare that is VM Customer Service, I am dreading my Digital Phone Switchover.

According to the engineer I met with, I will have to move my base station to the other side of the house so that it is placed next to the VM Hub. If this happens, I will not be able to use my landline in either the lounge or the master bedroom. So, essentially the landline will be useless for me.

In this situation, it may well be that I would decide to cancel my landline. So, I rang VM to discuss the costs involved. Finally, after a total of 7 hours on hold, I managed to speak with Tier 2 Retentions. I explained that I might be losing the ability to use the landline in the most important locations in my house. However, I was told that I would still need to pay an early disconnection fee if I wanted to cancel my landline.

How can this be legal? VM will have changed my service and essentially made it worthless to me. But I would still have to a large fee to cancel a worthless service!

If anyone else has been in a similar situation, I would be delighted to hear your experiences.

[Adri_G]

Hi, Telewestrefugee.
Thank you for the further posts and your questions, we wish to further advise where possible.

We can confirm that prior to a landline migration you may opt to cancel the landline / port it out to a different provider and keep the rest of your services with us.

If you cancel/port out your landline before the switchover and within the period confirmed over our pre-migration documents, you have the right to do without termination fees. (no EDF charges for removing the line). 
Please, refer to the emails/letters we've sent to confirm this period and bear in mind that once the service has changed to fibre you won't be able to revert this or cancel without termination fees till the end of your current contract with us.

For more info and all the answers to our FAQs regarding the switchover please refer to this link, if you have any further questions we'll do our best to advise. 

In case you're uncertain about the above dates we're eager to have a look so let us know if you need this.

[Telewestrefugee]

Hi Adri

That's very clear on the scheduled migration.

What is the situation for those who have a fibre phone installed outside of the scheduled migration, such as when there is a landline outage and VM install a fibre phone rather than fixing the outage. This is what has happened to some people in our road.

Obviously, in that situation the customer will not receive any paper work or cancellation period. Do they have an option to cancel retrospectively, once they have had a bit of time to think about it?

[Ayisha_B]

We advise to contact us before the date stated on the letter you receive from us, if you decided not to continue. 

In cases of faults where the migration is moved forward, and if there's any further issues, again we'd suggest contacting us to discuss downgrading the package if you no longer wanted the landline.

Please note this is something all providers are doing and not just Virgin Media. 

[Telewestrefugee]

When you say somebody should contact you as regards downgrading the landline, is that something which could be done by PM on this forum. Or would it require a phone call or webchat?

[Ayisha_B]

  We don't deal with package changes or cancellations via the Forums so if you did want to discuss those options, you'd need to call 0345 454 1111 or use the chat option.

[Telewestrefugee]

The thought of that fills me with dread. My last attempt was, by a very large margin, the worst customer service experience I have ever endured. It took more than seven hours, over two days, just to get some pretty basic information.

[Ayisha_B]

Our sincere apologies for the poor experience. It's not the level of service we aim to provide. 

We're unable to process disconnections or package changes here but if you need anything else, let us know.

Have a lovely weekend.