Virgin Media to Double Broadband Speed

[hjf288]

What is the discount on 100Mbit without phone line?

If I upgrade now, will I recieve the discount still?

[AndyCalling]

I've just PMed the two people who tried to check for me with my postcode. Fingers crossed...

[BenMcr]

Originally Posted by hjf288

What is the discount on 100Mbit without phone line?

If I upgrade now, will I recieve the discount still?

Details of the discount haven't been announced yet, and yes I would expect you would get it if you upgrade now

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by Kushan

I can't speak for every individual ticket and I haven't worked for the company for over 6 months now, but about February/march last year there was a noticeable jump in high-utilisation tickets actually getting fixed and that trend continued until I left.

EDIT: The high-utilisation was counted differently between DOCSIS1 and DOCSIS3 . I can't remember the statistics exactly, but on DOCSIS3 it was classed as high-utilisation if it was over 90% utilised for I think 10% of the time in any given week. It was something like that, anyway. There was a bit more to it than that, but that was the rule of thumb it went by. The problem is that some tickets would get left for ages, then utilisation would drop just enough (say all the students went home) that it wouldn't be high-util.

Yep the exact problem I am mentioning.

The first been that 90% is a very high threshold in the first place, the second been that VM doing things like leaving tickets waiting for students to go home so they can say its fixed. A policy where they just cancel tickets if utilisation "temporarily" drops is wrong. Because students going home then coming back is only a temporary event. As well as most other reasons why utilisation would drop for a short term time.

I suspect that timeframe you mentioned was a lot of issues getting fixed by the uplift work rather than VM actively running around specifically fixing utilisation issues, my own area went from dire to very good between jan and march 2011. That improvement lasting even until now although its been a progressive decline since june onwards so the improvement at this point is now much smaller.

Thanks for the openness.

[nomadking]

Originally Posted by AndyCalling

I've just PMed the two people who tried to check for me with my postcode. Fingers crossed...

For SO31 ***

But rest assured, my fittest, fastest engineers will be in your area between April and July.

[AndyCalling]

Thanks man, much appreciated.

[qasdfdsaq]

Ah, he beat me to it.

I have the feeling then that "October onwards" for me is just the same "Being planned" aka "We don't have a flipping clue" malarkey that the upstream uplift and 100mb upgrades sat at for nearly a year while their engineers sat around scratching their nuts.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Yep the exact problem I am mentioning.

The first been that 90% is a very high threshold in the first place, the second been that VM doing things like leaving tickets waiting for students to go home so they can say its fixed. A policy where they just cancel tickets if utilisation "temporarily" drops is wrong. Because students going home then coming back is only a temporary event. As well as most other reasons why utilisation would drop for a short term time.

I suspect that timeframe you mentioned was a lot of issues getting fixed by the uplift work rather than VM actively running around specifically fixing utilisation issues, my own area went from dire to very good between jan and march 2011. That improvement lasting even until now although its been a progressive decline since june onwards so the improvement at this point is now much smaller.

Thanks for the openness.

I don't mind being open about it. I'm a very harsh critic of Virgin, especially since many of my friends are being made redundant after being given no pay rise for nearly a decade (As well as bunch of other crap Virgin threw at their outsourced employees), however I will give them credit where it's due and there was definitely a lot of work being done to utilisation tickets last year (That was separate from the upload speed increase, as areas got their utilisation sorted long before they got their upload increase, while other areas got their upload increased but were still highly utilised). I only say "last year" because I can't be sure if it's still ongoing or not, but there were definitely a lot more issues getting fixed than the previous year - properly fixed with new hardware, not just "resegmentation" which is the usual thing they do (i.e. rejigging people around onto different cables because the load balancing doesn't work very well - of course, a lot of the time this would just cause the utilisation to shift around, or only dip enough to mark it as resolved).

Of course, the ticket-closing thing does happen. It happens not just to utilisation tickets, but to SNR tickets, fault tickets - you name it. There's a particular department that has a fantastic habit of doing this to tickets because their bonus is affected by how quickly they get issues fixed. A new ticket means it's a "new" issue and they've got a whole new SLA to play with. It's hard to say if this is a fault with that department, or if it's a fault with how their bonus is calculated - after all, it's not really their fault if they can't get an engineer to a site quickly enough, or if they can't get the go-ahead to upgrade a cab.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Kushan

Of course, the ticket-closing thing does happen. It happens not just to utilisation tickets, but to SNR tickets, fault tickets - you name it. There's a particular department that has a fantastic habit of doing this to tickets because their bonus is affected by how quickly they get issues fixed. A new ticket means it's a "new" issue and they've got a whole new SLA to play with. It's hard to say if this is a fault with that department, or if it's a fault with how their bonus is calculated - after all, it's not really their fault if they can't get an engineer to a site quickly enough, or if they can't get the go-ahead to upgrade a cab.

So basically lying and claiming something's been fixed when it hasn't so they can get a bigger bonus while customers suffer.

Great work ethic there

[AndyCalling]

@Kushan: Well it's clear that VM senior management deserve a kick in the nuts for treating staff like that. It's ruddy rude behaviour for any staff, let alone the dedicated types at VM.

Personally I'd give up the upgrade and have the money go to a pay increase to the VM front line workers. Anyone else?

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Kushan

There's a particular department that has a fantastic habit of doing this to tickets because their bonus is affected by how quickly they get issues fixed. A new ticket means it's a "new" issue and they've got a whole new SLA to play with. It's hard to say if this is a fault with that department, or if it's a fault with how their bonus is calculated - after all, it's not really their fault if they can't get an engineer to a site quickly enough, or if they can't get the go-ahead to upgrade a cab.

That'd be Access NMC then.

They did it to a ticket raised from a fault of mine twice. On the 3rd try once the CEO's office were giving them heat it was fixed within 48 hours.

---------- Post added at 14:03 ---------- Previous post was at 14:00 ----------

Originally Posted by AndyCalling

@Kushan: Well it's clear that VM senior management deserve a kick in the nuts for treating staff like that. It's ruddy rude behaviour for any staff, let alone the dedicated types at VM.

Personally I'd give up the upgrade and have the money go to a pay increase to the VM front line workers. Anyone else?

Nope. They're completely different budgets and the money is being spent for purely commercial reasons. It would be found from somewhere whatever.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by AndyCalling

@Kushan: Well it's clear that VM senior management deserve a kick in the nuts for treating staff like that. It's ruddy rude behaviour for any staff, let alone the dedicated types at VM.

Personally I'd give up the upgrade and have the money go to a pay increase to the VM front line workers. Anyone else?

If only it were that simple, a lot of it comes from the fact that Virgin outsourced a lot of their staff to IBM, who outsourced further to companies like Manpower and Adecco (and, of course, the lovely Offshore). There's certainly plenty of blame to go Virgin's way, though, as they wouldn't listen to many of the complaints staff had and just said "Go talk to your employer".

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

So basically lying and claiming something's been fixed when it hasn't so they can get a bigger bonus while customers suffer.

Great work ethic there

Well it depends on what you class as "Fixed". Sometimes, taking an SNR ticket as an example, it's really intermittent - a lot of noise for an hour or two in the morning, then fine again - maybe even for a day or two. There's not a lot that can be done while the fault is "gone" so chances are the ticket will get closed until it happens again. Sometimes it won't happen again, which is why they'll happily close tickets like that. Sometimes it happens and someone notices a pattern (say it's always on a wednesday at 8am, for example) and someone will specifically try to catch it, but yeah there are instances where closing tickets as "fixed" when nothing has been done is a perfectly valid things to do.

However, we're talking about utilisation and although there are instances when a high-util ticket is legitimately closed without any work being done (Sometimes, low SNR can cause utilisation to spike due to it falling back to a poor-bandwidth, but more error tolerant modulation), a lot of the time it seems to happen because they can't fix it and rather than just leaving the ticket in limbo, their preference is to close it. It's certainly naughty and it shouldn't be done, but it happens. I can't say who's really responsible for it, as we all know the saying - **** runs down hill - and I was very much near the bottom of said hill.

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

That'd be Access NMC then.

They did it to a ticket raised from a fault of mine twice. On the 3rd try once the CEO's office were giving them heat it was fixed within 48 hours.[COLOR="Silver"]

Nothing like a bit of ticket tennis with the ANMC crew.

[AndyCalling]

Playing Chinese walls with budgets is no excuse for treating workers that poorly. They are the engines of profit and should be treated as such. Claiming you don't have the money 'cause you've left it in your other pinstripe jacket is not going to fool anyone.

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by Kushan

I don't mind being open about it. I'm a very harsh critic of Virgin, especially since many of my friends are being made redundant after being given no pay rise for nearly a decade (As well as bunch of other crap Virgin threw at their outsourced employees), however I will give them credit where it's due and there was definitely a lot of work being done to utilisation tickets last year (That was separate from the upload speed increase, as areas got their utilisation sorted long before they got their upload increase, while other areas got their upload increased but were still highly utilised). I only say "last year" because I can't be sure if it's still ongoing or not, but there were definitely a lot more issues getting fixed than the previous year - properly fixed with new hardware, not just "resegmentation" which is the usual thing they do (i.e. rejigging people around onto different cables because the load balancing doesn't work very well - of course, a lot of the time this would just cause the utilisation to shift around, or only dip enough to mark it as resolved).

Of course, the ticket-closing thing does happen. It happens not just to utilisation tickets, but to SNR tickets, fault tickets - you name it. There's a particular department that has a fantastic habit of doing this to tickets because their bonus is affected by how quickly they get issues fixed. A new ticket means it's a "new" issue and they've got a whole new SLA to play with. It's hard to say if this is a fault with that department, or if it's a fault with how their bonus is calculated - after all, it's not really their fault if they can't get an engineer to a site quickly enough, or if they can't get the go-ahead to upgrade a cab.

seems that bonus system needs changing to if a fault reccours pay is deducted.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by AndyCalling

Playing Chinese walls with budgets is no excuse for treating workers that poorly. They are the engines of profit and should be treated as such. Claiming you don't have the money 'cause you've stuck it in your other pinstripe jacket is not going to fool anyone.

Neither is suggesting that VM are doing this out of the kindness of their own hearts and it's coming off the payroll budget. It's being funded from a one-off income not from operating income, and is considered essential to compete with BT et al.