Virgin Mobile

goz83

A short history:
I signed up for Virgin Mobile in March. I soon realised that I couldn't sent texts to "park by text" which was and still is a real problem, as my Dad and my Sister both live in apartments that have park by text. VM told me that they were working on the issue and I expected I would be able to send these texts in the near future and decided to hang on. As the months rolled on, I learned that I couldn't sent short code texts to most companies and worse still, I wasn't receiving service texts from Bank of Ireland, AIB, DPD, City-Bin and more.

Last month was the last straw. I was given false information on roaming in the USA. On the chat service, the rep told me that I would be charged €4.99 per GB of data and that I could receive calls and texts for free. OK, that was fine, except when I landed in NYC, the service text told me that I would be charged 99c per min to receive a call and it was €7.99 per MB of data (absolutely insane price) which meant I couldn't use my phone unless connected to wifi.

I asked about this on my return and I was told I would have to submit a data request to get the chat history (which was never sent to me in the first place). The chat rep was able to see the history, because he commented on parts of the conversation, so I was pretty annoyed that he wouldn't confirm to me what was said and was lying to me when saying he had no access to the conversation.

So I have sent in a data request and a complaint. I have had to deal with lies and incompetence as recently as 2 days ago when I spent almost 3 hours on chat to them.....but that's a whole other issue regarding missing reference numbers and an ability of an agent and a supervisor to follow a conversation, or answer very simple questions.

Yesterday, I received a reply to my complaint which was about not being able to send, or receive texts to and from what they deem to be "premium services". I have also had an ongoing intermittent issue with mobile broadband.

The reply was to educate me as to what LTE meant (4G) but did not deal with the issue I had. And as for the texts, I was twice referred to section 4.8 of their terms and conditions which is:
4.8 Premium Rate Services are supported in the Services but with limited availability. We cannot support all premium SMS
services on the market. In the case of premium SMS and premium telephone numbers (e.g. 1515, 1530) our involvement is
limited to the collection of charges. In the event of any questions and complaints relating to Premium Rate Services please
contact the relevant Premium Rate Services provider directly. We can block access to all Premium Rate Services upon request.

It would seem that before we sign up to a mobile service provider, we must first contact all other companies we do business with, (who might be a sender, or receiver of service texts) to ask if VM block their service texts.

I don't think the very vague term would hold up with a comreg complaint and I wonder if I should cancel the service and move on. Really not happy with VM mobile. I only wonder if I should first wait for proof that I was given false information first to give my case some more strength.

What do ye think?

ED E

Its not just Virgin.

All MVNOs on Three (iD, 48, Lyca, Tesco, Virgin...) have issues with short codes. They keep all randomly claiming its fixed, but sure enough it crops back up two weeks later.

If you want short codes: Three, Vodafone, Postphone and Eir/Meteor are ok.