[Dunderhead]

received an undated (and without a return correspondence address) letter from Trevor Elliott (MD, Customer Service, VirginMedia) advising me that they have been making some improvements to the way they look after my monthly bill and had noticed that they haven't been charging me enough so they are going to increase my charges by an unspecified amount.

So far, so boring. But a number of more interesting points arose when I spent half an hour talking to their Customer Services department:

1) Virgin are consolidating the former NTL billing systems, from two (broadband, telephone) into a single system
2) to support this, a data cleansing exercise has highlighted cases such as mine where an agreed bundle of services is supplied by NTL/ Virgin at a competitive discount - discounts which VM are no longer willing to honour
3) Virgin don't accept that they are breaking a contract with customers and are claiming the previous NTL discounts were merely an offer, not a contract
4) if the offer had been in writing, then they would honour it.
5) although there was no time limit on the offer, it could not be considered by their customers to be open-ended
6) the VM rep advised me that NTL staff were in the habit of offering silly discounts, just to retain customers (even though the discounts were simply to match market rates)

I don't know how many customers are affected by this but it could be quite a large number. I haven't spoken to Trevor Elliott yet but this all comes on the back of an extended period of appalling network performance.