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Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK has blamed a “system error” for leaving one of its new customers without a working internet connection for nearly five months, which resulted in repeated failures to complete the installation via missed engineer appointments. But to make matters worse, the provider initially only offered £30+ worth of compensation for the trouble.
The problems began for Totnes (Devon) based mum Cathy Meredith in mid-January 2025, when she lost internet access. Cathy has to care for a disabled adult daughter who suffers from multiple conditions and was initially given a new installation date of 4th February. But despite over 50 attempts being made by Ms Meredith to get the installation completed, the family remained offline until 27th June 2025.
During the long wait, Virgin Media is said to have scheduled incorrect engineers – resulting in missed appointments – and failed to complete the required exterior works in order to connect the service, until 10th June (as above, service activation then followed several days later).
According to the Totnes Times, Ms Meredith was then offered just over £30 in compensation, which she rightly found “offensive“. This is particularly true when we consider that Virgin Media are part of Ofcom’s Automatic Compensation scheme (full summary), which until April 2025 should have been paying out £29.15 for missed appointments and then £5.83 per day for delays to the start of a new service (this increased from April to £31.19 and £6.24, respectively).
Virgin Media originally tried to argue that the fault was with one of their third-party contractors and thus they only saw fit to offer compensation for the single week it actually took to carry out the final installation (once they sorted out their “system error“). But this neglects the fact that the customer’s contract is with Virgin Media (i.e. responsibility ultimately rests with your retail provider).
The long outage caused Cathy to depend on her limited pay-as-you-go mobile data connection. But the good news is that, after some pressure from the local newspaper, Virgin Media finally agreed to a more suitable level of compensation.
A spokesperson for Virgin Media said:
“We’ve spoken with Ms Meredith directly to apologise for the time it took to install her services. The initial delay was caused by the property requiring additional pre-enablement works which were unfortunately repeatedly rescheduled due to a system error.
In line with the auto-compensation scheme, Ms Meredith has received a credit of £792.48, and an additional £75 as a gesture of goodwill. We are happy to provide this in the form of a cheque if Ms Meredith would prefer, and we’re waiting to speak again at a time that’s convenient for her.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that we’ve seen a signatory ISP trying to wriggle out of paying customers the correct level of compensation under Ofcom’s scheme, and it really should not have taken media pressure to rectify the situation. We’d be interested to hear from any other Virgin Media customers who’ve had a struggle to get the provider to pay out the correct level of compensation under Auto Compensation.