[General Maximus]

I know what you mean, I think it is first line which is the problem. When 100mbits first came out VM press team posted an news release on the PR webpage saying that Lincoln along with 10 other areas was enabled as of that day and I checked the postcode checker and it said it was available. I rang up for it and the person I spoke was adamant that it wasn't available and wouldn't be ready for months. I went back to the news release and luckily there was a name and email address at the bottom of the release so I sent the woman a very nice email explaining the problem and how frustrated I was at the mixed messages. She replied the following day apologising profusely and assured me it had all been fixed and that there was a communication error. I rang back straight away and low and behold, I had no probs being upgraded.
When I rang up in February for 152mbits I had the same problem with customer services so I just put the phone down and rang retentions and they put it through straight away.

I think the moral of the story is that it all depends who you get through to. There some people who care about what they do and are in position to do things and there are other people who couldn't give a **** and think they get paid to ******** people and get them off the phone.

In defence of the dude above though, I am pretty sure 1st line can't raise an issue with networks directly even if they can see 95% of the modems are offline as you stated. They are only able to book tech visits and VM have an automated system in place which flags a huge number of visits to one area, somebody non-1st line looks at it and realises there is an area and then sends it to networks. So he was actually helping by booking a tech because the more visits he books the more likely it is that the fault will be picked up.