When VM works, it is excellent. Reliability is usually good. Speeds are routinely high without any odd fall off. Value is good for new customer deals, and there's packages like Volt that are well worth a look. This forum and the VM staff who participate (visible by the VM logo against their name on the left) is a small beacon of light in the huge, dark uncaring universe of VM's customer service options. The service does work for most customers, most of the time.
Against that, there's been long running problems of getting new customers connected, where a two week install time has sometimes extended out to many months. If you encounter technical or billing problems, then abandon all hope because VM's customer service via telephone is the worst of any company I have ever encountered. Customers regularly report broken promises to fix problems, hours-long customer service calls whilst being passed around unhelpful, disinterested staff who don't understand the technology and/or the customer problem. Occasionally but repeatedly we read reports here of bare faced lies or made-up on the spot claptrap from customer service agents. Formal complaint handling is very poor. Any promise about anything from VM staff or systems (install dates, problem fix dates, customer service call backs etc) needs to be treated as a means of ending a call and chalking it up as "resolved" rather than having any truth. Many aspects of VM operations are subcontracted, leading to dreadful or non-existent customer communication, and even within VM, specific activities are conducted in silos that don't talk to each other, and can't break through the company's own red tape even when the staff try. If you ever wondered what happened to the Iron Curtain when the Soviet Union collapsed, I can advise that Virgin Media bought it and installed it between it's own departments, as well as appointing Aeroflot's management to head up customer experience. Re-contracting to get a decent price at the end of a new customer deal can be a tedious exercise, and even when customers think all is good, we see regular reports of agents agreeing one deal, and putting another on the system. Whilst VM (and all other ISPs) bandy round the term "fibre" this means nothing helpful. In VM's case 80% of customers are on hybrid fibre-coaxial networks where the last few hundred metres of the network are delivered by ageing analogue radio frequency technology that is prone to odd problems, and getting things diagnosed and fixed can be a lottery. The hubs VM supply are a very mixed bag. In a very few cases they're handing new customers six year old antique Superhub 2ac's that have been through multiple customers hands already. The Hub 3 is currently the most stable and bug free, the newest Hub 5 is to be avoided unless you wish to be a beta tester for an unfinished product, and the Hub 4 sits somewhere between those. Whichever model of hub you get, the wifi from all of them is weak. With the Hub 3 and 4 the company will offer boosters or mesh pods to improve things, but compatibility is confusing, availability has been poor (and is at VM's discretion rather than a contractual entitlement), and if your package doesn't give you these free then renting them is very poor value. Personally I've invested in my own mesh wifi gear and run the hub purely as a cable modem, and suggest you mentally prepare yourself if experience shows you need to spend say £120 extra in this manner. VM's online support tools and account management options are primitive, like something from 1997, the chatbots you encounter via phone are as bad as the human agents, and seeking support other than through this forum is, largely in the words of another customer, a Kafkaesque nightmare of broken links, circular references, confusing and contradictory information.
Choose wisely!
If looking solely at Trustpilot, also visit ISPReview, which has a more informed user base a little less prone to angry outbursts. Unfortunately VM's ratings aren't much better, Sky do somewhat better. If you want a TV package you don't have much choice of course, if you can separate out the TV from the broadband, then consider the smaller customer service-led ISPs like Zen Internet, uno, Aquiss, CIX. Although they use Openreach, there's a vast gap between their ability to get the best out of Openreach and that of Sky or even BT themselves.
You can of course order both an Openreach ISP and VM. They'll both usually promise a two week install, and then you'll have a fourteen day cooling off period to cancel. If either get delayed or messed up, you've got a couple of weeks to consider how the other is performing and whether to cancel that. If both get installed on time, then you have that two weeks to run your own tests and see if speed, latency and reliability are as expected.
