Virgin Media compensation for Outages

[GiancarloBiondi]

Is anyone aware of standard compensation for outages. I recently suffered a break of over 24 hours in both Internet and Cable TV services that Virgin admitted to, but having reported this twice via the dreadful complaints form I have received totally inane responses. As far as I am concerned this a breach of the service agreement.

[MovedGoalPosts]

There is no service level agreement. Virgin Media, like most domestic suppliers do not guarantee a fault free service.

A 24 hour outage isn't that bad, after all how many techs do you think are sitting on their backsides waiting for a call out?

If the outages were happenning on a repeating basis, then I personally would consider it more significant. If the supplier wasn't making proper efforts to resolve I would be considering cancellation for a breach of the supplier's duty to provide an adequate service. It's a fine line where a not fault free service tips over into a failure to supply the adequate service. One 24 hour outage wouldn't be that tipping point in my view, despite the inconvenience.

Sometimes you might get a credit applied to your account, but it's a guesture of goodwill, rather than anything they have to give you.

In these instances it's always best to try and call and speak to some friendly customer service person, rather than using online forms which will often elicit a standard response.

A refund for loss of any service will be refunded but the fault has to be over 24hrs as the credit is worked out on a daily basic not a hourly

Think of it like this

for example you pay £18 for Broadband a 24 refund would be 60p, the ay its worked out is the amount you pay for the service divide by 30 days times by the amount of days you lost service for.

Originally Posted by darthlinux

A refund for loss of any service will be refunded but the fault has to be over 24hrs as the credit is worked out on a daily basic not a hourly

Think of it like this

for example you pay £18 for Broadband a 24 refund would be 60p, the ay its worked out is the amount you pay for the service divide by 30 days times by the amount of days you lost service for.

As Darthlinux says that is how we would calculate your loss of service so even on XL you would only get about £1.40 for loss of one days service.

[General Maximus]

as much as a loss of service is an inconvenience and you wish you could get something like £1000 off them (like the accident insurance ads on tv) unfortunately it isn't going to happen. A couple of years they had a big problem affecting the whole of Lincoln (don't know what it was) and nobody had internet access for 4 days and I nearly died I felt like they owed me big time but after moaning and moaning they offered me a 1 week refund which is a quarter of £25. Although you may want compensation, it isn't worth the effort.

[Fingers]

In early August, I had suffered nearly a month of shocking d/l speeds on my 20mb connection before I raised an issue. After going through all the relevant diagnosis tests with a very helpful (UK based) tech, we proved that it wasn't an issue with my PC/modem/wiring etc.

This led the tech to raise the issue with second line who informed us of a TX fault call with my UBR that had been raised (internally) in July. This then gave me an internal VM fault reference which I was able to take to a "Customer Concern" rep.

This rep looked at everything, found out when the UBR was scheduled to be repaired/replaced (end of November) and came back to me with an offer of £27 discount/rebate off my bill each month up to and including December. I happily accepted.

My connection is still up and I am not losing packets or having ping issues, just 10% of the normal d/l speed (usually 70kb/sec - 180kb/sec).

This gives you an idea of what it takes to get compensation. VM, in my experience, are fair if it is clear that something "abnormal" (such as a techncial fault) is causing you to suffer a reduction in service. However, slow speeds due to oversubscription or heavy usage in your area are very, very difficult to quantify.

[General Maximus]

the thing which frustrates me is that you shouldn't have to go to all that effort. If you ring them up now and tell them exactly what the problem is somebody should be able to look on the system and say "yep, we are aware there is a fault with ........................ in your area, it is going to be fixed in December and for your inconvenience we would like to offer you .........."

If they did that I wouldn't even want compensation, I just like to know when the problem is going to be fixed. The thing which has always niggled me in the past is that my connection is normally 100% and on the odd occassion that it has died for a day and I ring them up, they tell me they have run some tests, nothing is wrong and my pc must have a virus. When they say that, my head explodes

[Chuck]

One problem is that it costs quite a lot of money for companies to return money due to audit etc so they pay back £1.40 and it will cost them 10 times that to get agents to process and check the payment!

[Jeremy Harris]

We lost the cable service completely for about 7 or 8 days a while ago. After much hassle I had an offer of a free months service, but only after writing directly to a manager, who's address was obtained after a lot of detective work. Said manager was the only way to get the fault fixed as well - all the call centre did was keep sending the chaps in the van out, who would stop for a cup of tea, admit that it was a network fault they couldn't fix and get back in their van again..........

Reading the small print, it looks as if all service providers, both for internet related connectivity and normal household services, like water, electricity, gas etc, have a clause that says that they don't guarantee a fault free service.

Jeremy

Originally Posted by Jeremy Harris

Reading the small print, it looks as if all service providers, both for internet related connectivity and normal household services, like water, electricity, gas etc, have a clause that says that they don't guarantee a fault free service.

Jeremy

And the surprise there is................................................ ....

[Jeremy Harris]

No surprise at all for me, just an observation, nothing more.

I believe that most power, water etc providers do provide some form of agreed extended outage compensation package though, although whether or not an ISP supplying domestic service should do the same is a bit debatable, I suppose.

Jeremy

Originally Posted by Jeremy Harris

No surprise at all for me, just an observation, nothing more.

I believe that most power, water etc providers do provide some form of agreed extended outage compensation package though, although whether or not an ISP supplying domestic service should do the same is a bit debatable, I suppose.

Jeremy

They probably compensate in the same way by dividing your monthly bill into 30 and multiplying by the days of lost service.

[Jeremy Harris]

Originally Posted by whydoIneedatech

They probably compensate in the same way by dividing your monthly bill into 30 and multiplying by the days of lost service.

Maybe, but I seem to recall getting a compensation figure automatically from the electricity company a couple of years back that was a nice round figure and considerably more than the proportion of time that the supply was off (I think we were without power for about 20 hours or so). Mind you, this could have been a "goodwill" type payment, I suppose, much like the free month I got when the cable network went down for a week.

I may be that the regulators for power, water etc providers have laid down some rules on compensation. I doubt that Ofcom (or whoever it is that rather ineffectually regulates ISPs) has managed to enforce something similar.

Jeremy

Originally Posted by Jeremy Harris

Maybe, but I seem to recall getting a compensation figure automatically from the electricity company a couple of years back that was a nice round figure and considerably more than the proportion of time that the supply was off (I think we were without power for about 20 hours or so). Mind you, this could have been a "goodwill" type payment, I suppose, much like the free month I got when the cable network went down for a week.

I may be that the regulators for power, water etc providers have laid down some rules on compensation. I doubt that Ofcom (or whoever it is that rather ineffectually regulates ISPs) has managed to enforce something similar.

Jeremy

A lot of companies will do "goodwill payments" but you only get them in a lot of cases if you do not scream and shout or you may still get one but less than if you spoke more reasonably to the person on the other end of the phone.

[Chuck]

You could argue that water, gas or electricity is 'essential' while, to some, phone, internet and cable TV isn't. I suppose that might be why there is a difference.

Also some companies can claim from the 'carrier' if it is their fault and pass some of that on to their customers. So companies that supply gas don't own the pipes but just pay a charge to use them, when they break they probably have a clause that gets them some money back.

I believe that all the Virgin kit is owned by them so no one to claim from!