120M Best way to escalate a utilisation fault? - Page 4

The PIT · 30-04-2014, 20:39

Annoying thing they'll be mis selling to loads of people and making the problem worse. To be honest this should be illegal. I'll know they'll point out to xxx speed but really it's disgusting they're allowed to do it and allowed to get away with it.
I think longest fault I heard of is three years. Dunno if that one has been fixed or not.
I suppose you pass out flyers to people in your area and get them to complain. That may make Virgin move a bit.

Kushan · 01-05-2014, 10:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by The PIT

Annoying thing they'll be mis selling to loads of people and making the problem worse. To be honest this should be illegal. I'll know they'll point out to xxx speed but really it's disgusting they're allowed to do it and allowed to get away with it.
I think longest fault I heard of is three years. Dunno if that one has been fixed or not.
I suppose you pass out flyers to people in your area and get them to complain. That may make Virgin move a bit.

Unfortunately, the reason it's legal is because they sell an "up to" service. It's not much different to how DSL providers sell "up to" knowing that the further away you are, the less you're likely to receive.

I know that OFCOM has clamped down on this a lot and they're all forced to indicate what speeds you should realistically achieve. In an uncongested Area, Virgin can say that you'll get the 50, 100 or 152MBit speeds they advertise but I don't think they've got any tool for sales to check congestion levels and estimate speeds then.

However, I don't know what OFCOM's rules on this is - they dictate that a certain % of customers must be able to obtain that speed, but I don't know if that's in a given area or the ISP as a whole. That would explain why they've over provisioned so much, so that average speed is pulled higher by the uncongested areas.

cook1984 · 03-05-2014, 19:25

They should be required to publish independent stats on their speeds, latency and packet loss with every advert. So when it says "150Mb" in brackets afterwards it would say "(average 95Mb, 45ms, 1.2% packet loss, streaming quality poor)".

Also I should be allowed to pay them "up to" £45/month.

Kushan · 05-05-2014, 19:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by cook1984

They should be required to publish independent stats on their speeds, latency and packet loss with every advert. So when it says "150Mb" in brackets afterwards it would say "(average 95Mb, 45ms, 1.2% packet loss, streaming quality poor)".

Also I should be allowed to pay them "up to" £45/month.

As much as I agree with the above, I'm not sure the average joe will understand what packet loss or latency is or how it affects them. Plus, while they concentrate on just headline speeds, they can have whatever latency they want, it isn't false advertising.

Ignitionnet · 05-05-2014, 19:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by cook1984

They should be required to publish independent stats on their speeds, latency and packet loss with every advert. So when it says "150Mb" in brackets afterwards it would say "(average 95Mb, 45ms, 1.2% packet loss, streaming quality poor)".

Also I should be allowed to pay them "up to" £45/month.

Speed, latency and packet loss to what? Mean or median speeds? What sample size? Judging streaming quality how? Is average Joe going to understand this?

cook1984 · 05-05-2014, 22:02

They need to publish detailed stats, and then others can interpret them and produce guides. Perhaps in advertising they could have a simple traffic light system similar to food labelling. Categories like "speed", "gaming" and "video" would be easy enough to understand. Virgin would get say green for speed, yellow for gaming (because of crap latency) and red for streaming (because Netflix doesn't work in some places).

The numbers would always be the lowest found anywhere on the network that doesn't have a temporary (<1 month to fix) fault, encouraging the ISP not to simply deal with the cheap and easy areas to get good stats.

ianch99 · 12-08-2014, 10:03

Our utilisation fault is now two years old (happy birthday!) and is as bad as ever:

so I got back in touch with the VM Complaints Dept (via the CEO Office) and the lady I spoke to emailed the Network Manager in charge of the works and got back to me with some of the comments from her email thread:

Quote:

With this bunch of nodes grouped together on a single bonded group, I can't see the move to 12 Channels being 'the big fix'

17A01
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Is <name> able to advise if there is a longer term upgrade design for these nodes?

Thanks
<name>

Hi <names>,

The downstream is the worse on this interface, they are on Tracker to go to 12 channels but no design has been issued yet, I have passed the email onto the team manager to see what the problem is and ask when a design will be issued if there is not a problem.

The upstream is also congested at the moment, but there are 4 upstream's and only 3 seem to be in service, so I will contact <name> on his return tomorrow and ask him to look into it.

She said she will try and push for more information but what is interesting, in a wider context, is the pending 12 DS channel push ..

General Maximus · 12-08-2014, 13:05

interesting, it looks like they are going to have to some major upgrades to do to fix that problem rather than just add more channels to the service group.

Ignitionnet · 12-08-2014, 13:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by General Maximus

interesting, it looks like they are going to have to some major upgrades to do to fix that problem rather than just add more channels to the service group.

Business as usual resegmentation / node split. Evidently not a simple one though!

General Maximus · 12-08-2014, 13:40

sad that with all the upgrade work that has been going on over the last two years for the speed doubling and the new tiers now, that it hasn't been addressed.

vincerooney · 15-08-2014, 15:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by General Maximus

sad that with all the upgrade work that has been going on over the last two years for the speed doubling and the new tiers now, that it hasn't been addressed.

Aye rather than boosting everyones speed maybe they should give everyone the speeds theyre paying for firstly...

My utilisation fault was meant to be fixed in march...and then it was may. and then june and then july. Now its going to be done in january 2015. How busy are VM that they cant do any work on something for almost an entire year....am not confident itll be done then either!

They keep saying ill get a credit on my bill if i keep calling up. They never do it though!

General Maximus · 15-08-2014, 15:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by vincerooney

Now its going to be done in january 2015

and the extremely frustrating think about all this is that VM typically announce a new upgrade/speed increase in November in lieu of price increase due in February. So by the time they get round to doing your relief work in January, they'll be starting the new rollout of whatever speed increase and you'll be back to square one again.

Kushan · 15-08-2014, 17:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by vincerooney

Aye rather than boosting everyones speed maybe they should give everyone the speeds theyre paying for firstly...

My utilisation fault was meant to be fixed in march...and then it was may. and then june and then july. Now its going to be done in january 2015. How busy are VM that they cant do any work on something for almost an entire year....am not confident itll be done then either!

They keep saying ill get a credit on my bill if i keep calling up. They never do it though!

While I'm not going to claim that Virgin don't often take the **** when it comes to dealing with utilisation, lately they've been better at it so I wonder what's really going on in your area. There must be some complication, or some red tape causing delays.

ianch99 · 15-08-2014, 19:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kushan

While I'm not going to claim that Virgin don't often take the **** when it comes to dealing with utilisation, lately they've been better at it so I wonder what's really going on in your area. There must be some complication, or some red tape causing delays.

What do you think would be the cause of the 2 year delay in my case?

Kushan · 15-08-2014, 23:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by ianch99

What do you think would be the cause of the 2 year delay in my case?

I don't know enough about that side of the business to say. I know that some areas are harder to upgrade than others, there's only so much splitting and stuff that they can do before they need to throw in more planning permission from councils and that kind of thing.