Hmm, I stopped getting notifications about replies to this thread 2 weeks ago so I'm sorry I haven't been by.
Still no improvement with my situation as far as my line speed goes.
The tech came to the house, fitted a -10db FPA. That got the power levels perfect but given the issue I was having he figured it was best to make a call while he was here and confirmed with someone that we have a utilisation issue on the cab that had already been flagged.
Estimated resolution date is 30/6 so I rang up to see what they could offer me for the next three months. Best I could get was £10 discount which included a downgrade to 50mb. I said that was no good to me because I need the upload speed of the 100mb which I was still getting even when my download speed dipped below 2mb. I only have internet so though £10 off might be proportional if you have other services with VM and these other services are working fine. I don't feel that less than a third off my bill for less than 1/50 of my connection at the most important time of day was good enough but they couldn't/wouldn't budge on the £10 discount.
I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was a brand new customer and I decided I was going to leave VM. The CS person I was speaking to put me through to retentions and I expected to be offered a little bit more of a discount to stay but I got nothing and ended up terminating the contract.
Now I know from past experience how cancellations work with VM so I fully expected somebody to call me back later in the week. Sure enough two days later I got a phone call and have been offered £10 per month discount for 12 months on my 100mb so no need to step down to 50mb. Thats effectively 4x the discount I was originally offered but averaged out over the year or 3 months free depending how you look at it. As long as the connection is sorted on the 30/6 as promised I think that's a pretty good deal so I took it.
Everybody I have spoken to within VM has been polite, sympathetic, helpful and most importantly for me easy to understand. I'm not the sort of person who goes on a rant about offshore call centres but with the anxiety I have making these phone calls in the first place I'm always filled with dread when I get a crackly line to somebody with a thick foreign accent.
So even though I've had a shaky start with VM this time around I'm quite happy with how it turned out. And thanks again to everybody on here who offered advice, help and new Sci-Fi suggestions

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