Virgin Mobile: The State of Play

With MTN mucking me around with their theft of my airtime and the emptying of the glorious 'bottomless cup', I decided to see what the state of play was with Virgin Mobile.

I haven't used their data offering very much since I complained to Gerald Terreblanche about their excessively slow speeds and lack of reliabilty. Given that I like to offer no-hopers a second chance, I loaded some airtime and cast off into previously charted and eerily familiar rocky waters.

Unsurpisingly not much has changed. I still get download speeds that can be measured in fractions of a Kb/s like 0.6. Today I managed to reach the whole numbers at 1.2 (hooray!)

Last night was particularly bad. Whilst attempting to load 2 HTML pagesn (let's not tax their system too much) and after waiting the requisite 2-3 minutes per page and the normal amount of reloading, all data throughput just stopped. Great, I thought, now's the time to call customer services to see what the matter was. To be honest I had forgotten the callcentre number and had to look in the Virgin Mobile handbook. "Dial 123 free" to reach the 'Sort Me Out Centre' it says on page 2 in typical Virgin jokey style.

I dialed, expecting to reach someone quickly as before. No, out of luck again. I get a "beep, beep, beep" sound and a message on my handset that says "Network busy". Well that accounted for the problem, they presumably had too many users.

I tried again today. The internet is once again as slow as trudging through mud. Once again I tried calling 123. No luck. Unless they have changed the number or all staff are taking compassionate leave in honour of the late Mr. Unlucky Dube I would guess they are in trouble.

What to do now is the question? The reps on the forum have gone away like a chastised dog with its tail between its legs and their 'Sort Me Out Centre' is err.. out. I might have to look in my 10-month old archives and fire off the same e-mail to Gerald and his cronies - ah, alas but that requires an internet connection. Stumped again Virgin Mobile. Stumped again! MTN come back, all is forgiven ...!

Virgin has the offering of interent, but it really seems like they dont focus to much on this part of their business. Its very, very wish-washy, inconsistant, and sometimes non-existant.

They really need to focus more on this. Virgin Internet sometimes is a real let down.

Ditto guys!
Did my banking on Virgin after a 8 month boycott, and its still horrible.
Glad i stuck with Vodacom, although i pity the poor mortal who uses this network for internet..
GO BOKKE ,GO BOYS DO IT AGAIN!!!!!!

It's working a little faster tonight (everyone already sitting in front of the box for the rugby)

BTW. A Virgin rep admitted that the 123 service has been down completely today as well.

I'm mostly on VC these days but I've also noticed MTN "fixed" their network

This is brilliant. No SMS on Virgin. Nice one. I think I'm going to swop my Virgin SIM for something better, like... hmm... say... a piece of toast!

I've simply had enough of this - I'm going back to Vodacom. I really wanted to support Virgin, honestly, I really did. You can read my previous posts. But the Virgin network really just is that bad that there isn't possibly anything good left to say about it.

"And the truth shall set you free" of vm and all there lies..lol

Skeptik, after seeing your post I decided to dig up my Virgin sim card and give it a try again too. There was still about 10 bucks left on it so why not. After about 10 minutes I threw it away. Permanently.

Shame on you Virgin, this is pathetic.