News 

The installers turned up on time, but the picture on the left shows the unfinished state of the install. We've also got a series of shots on our Flickr album. Rather than neatly bury the cable or tuck it out of the way, the installers threw it over our hedge and wrapped it around our neighbour's fence. Dustbins and recycling boxes were thrown over the garden and left there, and a sizeable length of coaxial cable was just left lying around. The street fared no better, with the cover for cable access being dumped on the floor and the coax cable just pulled vertically out of it.

We were told by the installer who fitted our box, and who did a good job of the internal work, that the team outside running the cable would be "back to tidy up". This never happened, so we were left to deal with customer services.

Virgin Media has a single telephone number for all customer enquiries. We were routed to the over-seas call centre, where the customer support person struggled to understand our problem. After much explaining we were told to phone the Damage line (0870 888 3116), which unfortunately turned out to be the department that deals with damaged external boxes, not installation

ADVERTISEMENT

problems.

We finally managed to get through to the UK call centre, where they understood the problem but couldn't fix it. Instead, we were given a third telephone number to call, this time for Installation Support (0800 073 1132).

The first person we spoke to said, "Someone has been out today."

That turned out not to be true, so we phoned back the next day and were told, "You need to talk to customer services, as we only liaise with external teams." After a bit of badgering they eventually agreed to look into the problem, after which an engineer was finally sent around to fix the messy installation.

Sadly, at this point the V+ box didn't work and we couldn't pause live TV, set recordings or do any of the things that V+ is supposed to let you do. A message popped up that said, "The V+ service is not enabled."

Back on the phone, we got through to the Indian call centre. Again, the assistant couldn't understand the problem and thought that we'd reported a broken remote control. This problem was eventually recorded as being that no V+ box had been installed. The problem persisted.

Phoning the helpline again, we got put through to the Indian call centre, where we finally managed to speak to someone who understood the problem. They attempted to fix it, but were ultimately unable to as they were running software that was incompatible with our set-top box. We were then given a fourth telephone number to ring, this time for Customer Relations (0800 052 9403), which is only open Monday to Friday. First, we were directed to the internal billing system, which asked which of the four billing systems (NTL ICOMS, Telewest ICOMS, SABS and SMS) we wanted to use. We rang back and this time the customer support assistant checked our box and updated it, as it had "incorrect codes" on it. Finally, our TV was installed and working correctly.