Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

What is the discount on 100Mbit without phone line?

If I upgrade now, will I recieve the discount still?

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

I've just PMed the two people who tried to check for me with my postcode. Fingers crossed...

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

Details of the discount haven't been announced yet, and yes I would expect you would get it if you upgrade now

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

Yep the exact problem I am mentioning.

The first been that 90% is a very high threshold in the first place, the second been that VM doing things like leaving tickets waiting for students to go home so they can say its fixed. A policy where they just cancel tickets if utilisation "temporarily" drops is wrong. Because students going home then coming back is only a temporary event. As well as most other reasons why utilisation would drop for a short term time.

I suspect that timeframe you mentioned was a lot of issues getting fixed by the uplift work rather than VM actively running around specifically fixing utilisation issues, my own area went from dire to very good between jan and march 2011. That improvement lasting even until now although its been a progressive decline since june onwards so the improvement at this point is now much smaller.

Thanks for the openness.

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

For SO31 ***

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

Thanks man, much appreciated.

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

Ah, he beat me to it.

I have the feeling then that "October onwards" for me is just the same "Being planned" aka "We don't have a flipping clue" malarkey that the upstream uplift and 100mb upgrades sat at for nearly a year while their engineers sat around scratching their nuts.

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

I don't mind being open about it. I'm a very harsh critic of Virgin, especially since many of my friends are being made redundant after being given no pay rise for nearly a decade (As well as bunch of other crap Virgin threw at their outsourced employees), however I will give them credit where it's due and there was definitely a lot of work being done to utilisation tickets last year (That was separate from the upload speed increase, as areas got their utilisation sorted long before they got their upload increase, while other areas got their upload increased but were still highly utilised). I only say "last year" because I can't be sure if it's still ongoing or not, but there were definitely a lot more issues getting fixed than the previous year - properly fixed with new hardware, not just "resegmentation" which is the usual thing they do (i.e. rejigging people around onto different cables because the load balancing doesn't work very well - of course, a lot of the time this would just cause the utilisation to shift around, or only dip enough to mark it as resolved).

Of course, the ticket-closing thing does happen. It happens not just to utilisation tickets, but to SNR tickets, fault tickets - you name it. There's a particular department that has a fantastic habit of doing this to tickets because their bonus is affected by how quickly they get issues fixed. A new ticket means it's a "new" issue and they've got a whole new SLA to play with. It's hard to say if this is a fault with that department, or if it's a fault with how their bonus is calculated - after all, it's not really their fault if they can't get an engineer to a site quickly enough, or if they can't get the go-ahead to upgrade a cab.

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

So basically lying and claiming something's been fixed when it hasn't so they can get a bigger bonus while customers suffer.

Great work ethic there :)

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

@Kushan: Well it's clear that VM senior management deserve a kick in the nuts for treating staff like that. It's ruddy rude behaviour for any staff, let alone the dedicated types at VM.

Personally I'd give up the upgrade and have the money go to a pay increase to the VM front line workers. Anyone else?

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

That'd be Access NMC then.

They did it to a ticket raised from a fault of mine twice. On the 3rd try once the CEO's office were giving them heat it was fixed within 48 hours.

---------- Post added at 14:03 ---------- Previous post was at 14:00 ----------

Nope. They're completely different budgets and the money is being spent for purely commercial reasons. It would be found from somewhere whatever.

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

If only it were that simple, a lot of it comes from the fact that Virgin outsourced a lot of their staff to IBM, who outsourced further to companies like Manpower and Adecco (and, of course, the lovely Offshore). There's certainly plenty of blame to go Virgin's way, though, as they wouldn't listen to many of the complaints staff had and just said "Go talk to your employer".

Well it depends on what you class as "Fixed". Sometimes, taking an SNR ticket as an example, it's really intermittent - a lot of noise for an hour or two in the morning, then fine again - maybe even for a day or two. There's not a lot that can be done while the fault is "gone" so chances are the ticket will get closed until it happens again. Sometimes it won't happen again, which is why they'll happily close tickets like that. Sometimes it happens and someone notices a pattern (say it's always on a wednesday at 8am, for example) and someone will specifically try to catch it, but yeah there are instances where closing tickets as "fixed" when nothing has been done is a perfectly valid things to do.

However, we're talking about utilisation and although there are instances when a high-util ticket is legitimately closed without any work being done (Sometimes, low SNR can cause utilisation to spike due to it falling back to a poor-bandwidth, but more error tolerant modulation), a lot of the time it seems to happen because they can't fix it and rather than just leaving the ticket in limbo, their preference is to close it. It's certainly naughty and it shouldn't be done, but it happens. I can't say who's really responsible for it, as we all know the saying - **** runs down hill - and I was very much near the bottom of said hill.

Nothing like a bit of ticket tennis with the ANMC crew.

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

Playing Chinese walls with budgets is no excuse for treating workers that poorly. They are the engines of profit and should be treated as such. Claiming you don't have the money 'cause you've left it in your other pinstripe jacket is not going to fool anyone.

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

seems that bonus system needs changing to if a fault reccours pay is deducted.

Re: Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed
 

Neither is suggesting that VM are doing this out of the kindness of their own hearts and it's coming off the payroll budget. It's being funded from a one-off income not from operating income, and is considered essential to compete with BT et al.