Tens of Thousands Flee From BT and Virgin 258
twoheadedboy writes "The two biggest ISPs in the UK are losing thousands of customers. Earlier this week Virgin reported it had lost 36,000 cable broadband customers. BT, meanwhile, has seen around 125,000 active consumer line customers flee this quarter. With that many customers leaving, where are they going?"
The Virgin case is interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Virgin is basically the only cable ISP in the UK. Whereas leaving BT just involves changing your DSL provider, which is a matter of a few phone calls, leaving Virgin involves setting up DSL at all, possibly including the installation of a new phone line - it's quite a bit more complicated and expensive.
The important thing to remember here is that Virgin are (a) relatively cheap (b) very fast (c) unbelievably shit. They're actually more incompetent now, both technically and in customer service, than they were as NTL. They are so shit that people give up cable to go back to DSL, even with the expensive faff involved.
Re:Overpriced (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. There are a lot of terrible cheap ISPs.
I use Zen, and the other good geek-friendly ISP is A&A. These companies do not fuck with your connection. They just don't. They're competent, they're nice, they have customer service. However, they're not cheap - £20-30/month. When cheap, shitty ISPs are offering deals at £8/mo, people go for the cheap deal, and promptly get what they're paying for.
Re:BT are crap. (Score:5, Informative)
Just FYI, Sky Broadband uses the same infrastructure as BT Broadband (both use BT OpenReach cabling). If you find BT laggy at peak times, you'll find Sky just the same.
Also, I know exactly two people who have been Sky Broadband customers- both were happy Sky TV customers, but were furious Sky Broadband customers- terrible customer service, endless technical problems, appalling support, and one of them was ripped off somewhat with the pricing (charged for a high-sped package that their local network couldn't support- paid it for 6 months until they finally managed to squeeze a refund out of them).
My advice is that if you must use the OpenReach network, go with one of the smaller players; at least they tend to offer better tech support when things go inevitably wrong.
People seem confused about Virgin, let me clarify. (Score:5, Informative)
Quite a few people have commented saying that it's no surprise that people are leaving BT - they're more expensive, utterly useless and switching DSL providers isn't as much hassle, whereas Virgin is a different case since their technology is actually better - why would people want to leave? The reasons are numerous, let me just give a few examples:
*Call centre staff are outsourced.
80% (if not more) of the call centre staff are outsourced to Indian call centres. This immediately creates a language barrier, particularly with anyone from Scotland as the outsourced staff can't understand the accent.
*ALL Call centre staff are severely undertrained
The offshore agents are barely trained at all, as they're trained by people who have been trained by people who have been trained by someone from IBM (whom Virgin contracts to do all their support) who hasn't actually done the job. The net result is that it takes agents months to get even remotely familliar with the tools and equipment Virgin uses and that's assuming they last that long.
Onshore isn't a great deal better. They have a dedicated training team, however the training period is 4 weeks. That's for EVERYTHING the job entails, from fixing modems, to wireless, to email and Virgin security. Years ago before wireless and the value added services were a factor, the training period was 6 weeks.
Additionally, the training material is GROSSLY out of date. It dictates that 2 days are spent learning how to adjust the frequency of a modem that is no longer used by Virgin. If a customer still has one of these modems, it is meant to be replaced immediately because it's well over 3 years old (more like 6). However, the training material is controlled by Virgin, who refuse to let the training team touch it. This means trainers are forced to train out old, outdated material and try to squeeze in the "real" material when and where they can.
The hiring process is even worse. No consideration is given to how technically minded you are, or how much you know about computers. I've seen people show up for customer services roles and been told they're going to do Technical support - despite barely knowing how to use a computer themselves.
*The VM Hub and Superhub
BT have a "home hub", whereas Virgin have relied on dedicated modems and separate routers for years. This meant that customers had to have 2 separate devices to get wireless and the wireless routers weren't Virgin specific (unlike the modems), meaning that customers could say they were broke, get new ones and sell them on ebay. So Virgin decided to do an all-in-one soultion, much like BT's home hub. There were two models - the VM hub and the "superhub". The VM Hub is a DOCSIS 2 device, the super hub is DOCSIS 3. The problem? Both hubs have issues, serious issues. The wireless range on the regular hub is ABYSMAL, you can literally lose the signal from being in the same room. The Superhub is SLIGHTLY better, but still nothing on a dedicated router. But can you still plug in your own router? Nope, VM deliberately disabled the DHCP options within the HUB, meaning you have to rely on it (although a patch is coming that will enable "gateway" mode). Other issues include the firewall causing connections to drop randomly, the hub would occasionally and for no reason decide to stop leasing IPs from the network, forcing the customer offline and so on. The list goes on and on and it still isn't fixed - most customers that went from a dedicated modem to a SHUB or HUB have regretted it and wanted their old modems back, but Virgin won't let support staff issue modems any more, so you're screwed.
*Sheer incompetence
The hubs are just one example of how useless Virgin are at implementing ANYTHING - they recently changed their website to "make it better" and give customers more control of their accounts, but instead it locked many customers out of their accounts entirely. It caused emails to get orphaned from accounts, meaning support staff wouldn't even attempt to reset a password or fix it because they
Re:Wholesalers? (Score:5, Informative)
Depending on exactly how you define resellers.
What has become increasingly common here in the UK is local loop unbundling. With local loop unbundling BT openreach* owns the physical line but the provider can operate their own ADSL gear. Afaict lines can be unbundled for just ADSL or for ADSL and voice (not sure if they can be unbundled for voice only or for ADSL and voice to different providers). LLU allows providers to avoid the high costs of using BTs ADSL backend network but comes at a price in that. So there are only a handful of LLU providers of which SKY and O2/BE (O2 bought BE but they still operate services under the BE name as we as their own) seem to be regarded as the best.
There are also many BT wholesale based providers but due to the way BT prices access to their backend network these tend to be expensive, congested or both.
* Part of BT but kept somewhat seperate from BTs other operations by the regulator.
Re:Wholesalers? (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, but how beautiful would it be if they were "giving up entirely"? Tens of thousands of people in the UK choosing to leave the internet. All at the same time.
Torchwood would get on it and big gay Jack would figure it right out. But only after much tension and drama.
Seriously, all these people left their ISPs because THEY'RE BROKE. They're now all stealing WiFi from their neighbors with open routers.
God bless 'em, every one.
Re:BT are crap. (Score:2, Informative)