Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

We have been suffering with a utilisation fault on our cable (to sotn8) for over 18 months now and I would welcome ideas on how I could raise the profile of the fault in an attempt to expedite it (if possible).

The first fault (F002097435) started life on 30th July 2012 and recently has been closed (27th Mar 2014) and a new one has taken its place: F002668758. This started life on 12 Sep 2013 and is still open.

The work requires resegmentation work to be carried out but this normally, from what I can gather, takes around 6 months, sometime less, sometimes more.

The slowdown in speeds follow the usual pattern: slower in the evenings and at weekends with speeds sometimes under 20Mbps on a 152Mbps service. I have seen slower speeds for utilisation faults so I guess things could be worse but it has been dragging on for a while now.

I was wondering if there is any mileage in trying to escalate this problem within VM to get closure on this fault? Support says they are not allow to contact the Network group who handle these works and so are unable to shed any light on the real state of the work.

Options I can think of are:

1. write letter (on paper) to Complaints section
2. email CEO office (VM and/or LG)
3. contact Network group (somehow) to inquire of real world status
4. do nothing

The artificial fix dates that are given customers does raise the question if VM are deliberately misleading customers here. An estimate is normally defined as the output of calculating approximately the amount, extent, magnitude, position, or value of something. In these cases, no calculation is being done, instead an arbitrary date is assigned.

Until an estimate can be done by Network then no fix date should be assigned .. once they assess the labour, capex, permits, etc. required for the works then they can assign a provisional fix date which of course can be reviewed based on real world progress.

The cynic in me would say that if VM told the customer of the real world estimate, they risk the customers leaving but if they drip feed short term promises then more customers would decide to stay ...

Interestingly this ties in with BT's "when will my cabinet be enabled for FTTC" estimates .. same approach is taken here as well. We live in a city where FTTC has been available for getting on for 3 years but when the Availability Date for our cab nears, it magically gets assigned to 3 months time .. been like this for last couple of years.

Wouldn't it be funny if car garages operated on the same fix date principles? "When will my car be fixed"? .. Oh next week sir, on Monday .. Monday arrives .. "I have come to collect my car" .. Ah .. Really sorry Sir, your car will be now ready week Tuesday ... week Tuesday comes around .. "My car? Can I collect it?" I am really sorry Sir but we need the car for another 2 weeks ... you get the idea ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

WOW! That isn't good - but surprising that they have upgraded you to the 152Mbps service without performing a full network re-segemtation change. Im assuming that the March closure date on that fault was related to the speed uplift?

Any escalation is better than relying on customer services to give you an update on a fault.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I had a rapid response from the CEO's office, and a quick resolution.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

The fault closed in March was ostensibly for (my cable's) utilisation issue so maybe they closed it because it was running too long and wanted to open a new one to take its place? I guess this looks better ..

The area upgrade is certainly available to new & existing customers. It could be that only my network segment is suffering from this issue. We (customers) get no insight into the network loading at an area level and I doubt whether VM have the metrics available (to Customer Service) to determine if a particular customer's connection should be upgraded. The Southampton head-end has 9 or so CMTS' (going by the numbering) and each CMTS handles a number of network segments each provisioning groups of customers so who can tell if we are just the unlucky few (in which case sotn customers can and should be upgraded) or if we are representative of the majority (in which case tier upgrades should be blocked for sotn)

---------- Post added at 19:03 ---------- Previous post was at 19:02 ----------

Sounds good. Who did you contact and how did you do this? Thanks ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

email
tom.mockridge@virginmedia.co.uk it will get passed to the department who will deal with your problem.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Emailing the CEO office in the past sometimes helped but if a re-segmentation is needed they probably can't speed that up. Sometimes it's possible they can move you to another UBR with less utilisation but they don't like doing it and might not offer that.

Personally I moved to another ISP 18 or so months ago after having similar problems over a similar time period with VM. Not looked back since. Hope you get that option soon!

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Some resegs are very complex and can take time to do and some are very simple and take no time to do .:)

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Which is an excellent reason to plan and implement them in advance rather than waiting for problems and reacting. Networks should be working on node splits as soon as the node is maxed out on channels / modulations so that they can be delivered promptly.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I agree that VM do not excel are being proactive in their capacity planning at least on a micro scale. They tend to band aid problems on a reactive basis ..

The real problem here is not that they do not fix network issues (eventually) but the lack of visibility & information into the process. The current auto fix date generation process leaves a lot to be desired

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

As far as I understand it, Virgin prioritise where the most customers complain. No single customer is likely to cause them to push a reseg up but if they get hundreds and hundreds of people calling in because of it, they'll do what they can because it's costing them more money.

Emailing the CEO will help a little, but again it helps if lots of customers are complaining.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Agreed but what percentage of customers that are affected actually a) know what is going on b) are bothered enough to complain and c) have the energy to pursue the complaint ..

VM *know* by looking at the CMTS usage stats if there is or is not a utilisation problem on a particular network segment. The issue here is, as you put it, that it takes "hundreds and hundreds of people calling in" to expedite a resolution

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I'm simply stating that Virgin will always do what's best for the business - if a fault is costing them more money in the short term, they'll escalate a fix. You're absolutely right, for slow speeds most customers won't even notice, or if they do won't bother to phone in - this is why Virgin doesn't put slow speeds very high on the priority list, especially given how expensive it is to fix.

To put it into perspective, 3 Customers with a total loss of connection will have a higher priority than 100 customers with slow speeds.

Virgin knows exactly how many customers are affected by any particular issue, but they also know that some issues will cause more phone calls than others and will focus accordingly. It's not ideal at all but that's how it works.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Furthermore, in areas with heavy chronic congestion people get so used to the low speeds and know that everyone else around gets the same crap all the time too that they give up and just consider it "normal".

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Having just renewed my contract I have been upgraded to 152Mbps today, engineer swapped my Supper hub for a hub 2 (Modem Mode). I checked the speed at around 1.00PM today after install (152+), just checked at about 8.30 PM (31Mbps) Ping and Jitter also much higher! (16ms Ping, 0ms Jitter normal now 40ms Ping 20ms Jitter
Seems like I also have high utilisation, it’s a shame as I choose not to bother with Xbox live during this time as it runs so bad (FPS).
So if you use the internet during the peak times you get no benefit from a higher speed?
Before renewing my contract I checked for BT Infinity in my area, coming soon!
Is it worth complaining about their network being overloaded? Has anyone had this problem resolved?
I will be switching to BT Infinity this time next year, Clock is ticking Virgin!

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Why not you have nothing to loose.