Virgin offers 16Mbps to its ADSL customers
Communications giant Virgin Media is boosting the speeds of its ADSL customers with the offer of a 16Mbps connection according to reports.
For a number of years the communications giant Virgin Media has been looking for different ways to try and stay a step ahead of the competition in an increasingly competitive market. It is now launching a 16Mbps connection geared towards its ADSL customers according to a recent report, enabling its ADSL customers to enjoy greater broadband speeds.
The 16Mbps connection being offered to ADSL customers is twice the speed that was offered previously, which was 8Mbps. Customers will be able to trial the service for free for the first three months, so they can boost their speeds without paying any additional money. After the first three months the cost of the 16Mbps connection will be £5 per month on top of the package fee. Virgin stated that there is no minimum contract for the increased speed.
One official from Virgin said: “We just want people to try it and give it a go. If the faster service is for them, they can pay to keep it going, but at least we know they’ve seen it.” Virgin officials think that the fact that no minimum contact is involved means that families will use the service perhaps over the Christmas to boost their speeds on a temporary basis.
However, analysts think that this is a way for Virgin to try and avoid the problems that have stemmed from promises of speeds up to a certain limits from broadband companies. One analyst said: “It is clear that Virgin Media wants to take no chances raising the ire of its customers with a service that promises too much but delivers too little. With Eclipse and TalkTalk having recently introduced speeds of up to 24Mb/sec, and UKOnline, Sky, Be and O2 already offering ADSL speeds between 16Mb/sec and 24Mb/sec, Virgin Media is all too aware of how fragile customer retention actually is.”
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“That’s sixteen megabits total over the day, usually,” said Virgin Media phone menu robot Mark Schweitzer, “but it’s very fast when it’s going. Plain old ADSL can’t hold a candle to it. You can hit your download limit in minutes!”
Customers will be able to add the boost free for three months, after which they will need to pay an additional £5 per month. The three months will start when Virgin ascertain the customer might possibly have thought about it in passing, probably last June. Should the customer be in any way less than satisfied, Virgin will be happy to leave you in a phone queue for three days, then disconnect your service entirely and charge you to switch it on again rather than just go back to the old plan like you asked them. And cut the cable outside your house and claim you did it. And pass your address to the record companies so they can send you threatening letters.
Virgin Media will also be releasing a new 50 megabit broadband service before Christmas. “We’ve heard that you can use things called ‘computers’ to send messages and even pictures. That’d be a good service to offer! We have this bloke in facilities who knows a bit about computers, we could get him to run it between refilling the coffee machines. If we tried, we could probably make it as reliable as our telly. Nobody really minds when the football drops out ten minutes before the end, do they.”
Virgin Media (“Because we’ve never done it before, and we don’t know how to”) was founded as an experiment by ethically challenged psychologists to ascertain just how abusively awful customer service could get and still have anyone giving them money. The company is sponsored by British Telecom to make them look good by comparison.
Blog rant: http://tinyurl.com/4kbxdp