Leaving over horrible experiences, London SE

Andersonm82 · 21-09-2009, 14:12

Signup in August. TV, phone and internet is working.

After a day, the internet stops working. Service engineer is called, with an ETA 3 days later.

The day before the engineer gets here, the line starts working again, so I tell them this and cancel the engineer.

The day the engineer should have been here the line stops working again. I wait a day - and it's still not working, so I book another engineer. ETA 4 days. It remains down for 3 of the 4 days.

The engineer finds that the "downstream impedance" is a bit high, so he puts an attenuator on the line. It starts working again. He also confirms a problem I've had, that regularly when calling Virgin's support line (150) I get disconnected, and automatically redialled. Apparently this is something that happens only when you dial Virgin, not anywhere else. The day after the engineer leaves, the line stops working again and stays down. At this point it's been working randomly about 1/3 of the time.

I call for an engineer again. At this point I should really be stuyding in a library, so I call Virgin at 11AM and say that I really need to know for sure that the engineer will be there that afternoon, and I didn't get a text confirmation. They say that he definitely will. I call again at 3.30PM, they say again that he definitely will. I call again at 4.20 - they say he definitely will, but were unable to reach him on the mobile, so either him or his manager will call me in maximum 20 minutes. 40 minutes later, nobody has called.

I call the disconnections line, and tell them that this sucks. At about 6PM someone tells me that the engineer had actually not made ANY of this appointments that afternoon and has disappeared. I'm surprised that none of the other people have called about their missed appointment so I could have been told of this earlier. Because I'm going on holiday for a week we agree to book an engineer for the first day after I get back to "give them one last chance to fix this", and to extend the money back guarantee until two days after.

After holidays a week later the engineer knocks on the door - and tells me that - what I've complained about is a common problem in the area that has been going on for MONTHS, and as he is just a service guy and not the network guy there's nothing he can do really, so he drives off!

I call the unhappy customers line again, who say something like "if there's a network problem he should have reported it" - Hello? Your FIELD network engineers have problems persisting for months that cause disconnections for a number of customers 2/3 of the days, and you have no clue about it centrally? Neither can they give an ETA for when it will be fixed. So I have no choice but to cancel. Which is a shame, because I liked it when it was working.

boredband · 21-09-2009, 15:20

Yikes

Its obviously a problem for the engineers as they are telling customers that the company they work for is not fixing known issues. I would guess that while the problem you experienced may not be acted on you can be pretty sure that the engineer will get disciplined fairly sharpish.

I should note that I work in high end data centres where the by-word of all vendors is 99.999% (five 9's) uptime. While I dont expect that service, the last time I totted up my broadband uptime I was at 98.5% (5.5 DAYS of no service). I am not counting midnight to 8am in that, just 8am to midnight. This is just barely acceptable, the only reason I put up with it is the fastest xDSL I can get is about 4mbit.

Andersonm82 · 21-09-2009, 16:21

It's really frustrating indeed, especially because the modem is next to the TV, so I got to stare at that flashing ready light for days straight

I suspect the upstream could have something to do with it, as my upstream transmit power as taken at random intervals over about 10 minutes was 61-46-33-61-21-8 dBmV. I actually meant to write in the first post that the downstream signal was too strong, as I'm literally 10 yards from the box, but I would have hoped that the tech who tested and mounted the downstream attenuator could have checked that as well.

When the guy on the door today told me there was nothing he could do I said "I think there could be a problem with the upstream" and he said "as I said, I'm not the network guy".

No offense intended to the Virgin techs here, but my suspicion is that the motivation and work scheduling system is really off. Like there's X assignments, and once you've ticked those off you can go home for the day (my tech today shouldn't have arrived until 3 they told me, but came at 11.30). Or pay per incident, and as long as it works when you leave the house it's "ticked off". I've read that attenuation is very much about distance to the box, so I'm disappointed that the installing tech didn't check it.

How about checking _everything_ at the time of installation and mounting whatever dongles are needed to get upstream and downstream perfect? Surely it's a lot cheaper than having installed customers cancel. I don't agree with the attitude that "If it works, then any numbers are OK" - because obviously sometimes it STOPS working.