Virgin Mobile

Does anyone have any experience with Virgin Mobile

Yes

are they any good

Yes,

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thanks im trying to get my dad away from vodafone

I had a fairly terrible customer service issue with them recently, and they’ve not been easy to contact at all the past few months.

They run off EE, so in terms of signal strength, it’s good. I used to be with EE directly though and found their CS to be much better :sweat_smile: I plan on moving back to them, or to O2, once the new iPhones come out :joy:

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ive been able to contact virgin mobile customer service easy to get through

They might have improved now. My issue was 3/4 months ago, and it was pretty unreliable.

In general I’ve not had the best experience with them, hopefully it goes better for your dad!

well i managed to speak to vodafone and get them to pull him out of contract as he aint had service in hes area for like 7 months they say they fix it then it goes again and now from the 16th of this month till november 25th there is works going on

Virgin Mobile is moving its network provider to Vodafone

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What was wrong with your other threads about mobile networks?

That’s not a certainty given the Virgin Media and O2 merger. It would be rather unusual for a fully fledged MNO to operate a MVNO on another network. I suppose it all comes down to the penalties in breaking the deal with Vodafone and potential savings from doing so.

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That, plus the fact that the merger with O2 won’t complete until the middle of next year if it goes through/smoothly and the fact that their EE contact will expire…

I wouldn’t expect that to factor into things too much as the transition to the Vodafone network wasn’t due to commence until the end of 2021/start of 2022 anyway.

Edit: Though Vodafone have won the ASDA Mobile contract from early 2021, so it would seem long term the biggest loser is BT/EE who are losing some big name MVNO partners.

It takes a long time to plan a network migration though - which means they may not have time to do so if/when the deal with O2 goes ahead for the reasons I mentioned.

Not sure how I missed this news, but I always imagined Sky would be the ones to merge with or buy O2-UK. Wonder how this will effect Sky Mobile going forward. O2 are the only carrier to get decent coverage where I live and Sky Mobile has all the features I want.

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Either way, they don’t appear to be going to continue with the Vodafone deal as they expect to be making savings from synergies including:

  • Use of existing infrastructure to provide services for each entity’s customers at lower cost compared to standalone / wholesale capabilities;
  • Migration of Virgin Media mobile traffic to Telefonica UK’s network;
  • Combination of regional and national network infrastructures and IT systems;

I expect it would be vastly cheaper to extend the current deal to permit a migration over paying the term of a Vodafone 5 year deal. That depends on the costs and savings more than anything. They’re not going to pay a competitor for 5 years because they’ve been ran out of time.

I don’t think it will affect Sky much in the short term as O2 will honour any MVNO agreements and likely not want to lose them as a MVNO partner. After all, BT/EE have been providing Virgin Media with their service for years.

However, longer term I suspect Sky might be shopping around for either a better deal or a mobile network of their own.

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They are absolute monkeys as far as my experience goes, so no I wouldn’t recommend that disgusting company. A quick glance on their community shows how “well” they deal with problems & treat their customers and how years after their migration to BT/EE they still haven’t ironed out basic problems.

In terms of why my experience was so bad, it was down to speaking to multiple service reps, being transferred on the phone to the wrong department several times and being given incorrect information in more than one occasion - generally the things you would consider a “bad experience”. In particular I was using their text service (I prefer to have it in writing to refer to) and on multiple occasions would get “I’ll get back to you in a few moments” and then no reply for hours/days at its worst. On the whole, it took around 6 weeks to resolve the issue I had, most of which was caused by lack of capability with their technical systems.

I’ve been in and out of Customer Service through many companies over the years, so have plenty good and bad experiences, and this did highlight the things that are general bug bears for customers. I know what frustrated and disappointed me about my experience, but also what I like about good service experiences, so I do keep that in mind when on chat or calls :slight_smile:

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