200M : Long Term Oversubscription Fault

[Morgrin]

I was hoping someone could help with a little advice.

I am a long term Virgin Media customer, from NTL time, but since 2018 I have been suffering with an 'Oversubscription' fault.

The service I pay for is 200mb broadband (along with TV, phone, mobile), but during peak hours (the times I actually use my broadband) my download speed drops to about 50-70mb.

A call to Virgin Media technical support back in January 2019, I was told "Well 60mb is still quite good" !?!##! Obviously I wasn't very happy with this attitute so after requested log of a complaint, led to an engineer visit. The engineer had never heard of an 'Oversubscription fault' and after a call to his office said the fault would be fixed with 5 days.
7 days went by without change, so another call to Virgin Media (quoting the fault reference given to me by the engineer) and was told that an update was required and was scheduled for June-July 2019!
Phoned again in August as still no change ... schedule had been pushed back to December 2019.

Still no resolution, still suffering slow speeds during peak hours. I have a very tech savvy family and we always have numerous devices plus 3 wireless cloud camera, so the drop in speed really effects us.

Where can/should I go from here? Any advice will be gratefully received.

I am in Colchester Essex, CO2 area.

[pip08456]

BT?

A couple of things.

Ring up and register a formal complaint, that you're not getting what you paid for, and there is no perceived resolution.

At the same time, raise it on the @virginmedia twitter feed

Ask for credit for the time you haven't been getting the service you paid for.

Escalate and ask for a firm resolution date.

Plan B - see if BT (other suppliers available) fibre is available in your area.

[Kushan]

Yeah, so from my understanding when it comes to Oversubscription faults, Virgin effectively only budgets to "fix" so many of those at a time. Everything gets an estimated fix time of like 3+ months from now, but Virgin will have some priority list of the areas that are actually getting fixed. They'll just keep bumping the fix date until that area gets prioritised.

What determines that priority is still up for debate, but it's almost certainly nothing to do with the length of the fault and more to do with the impact of the fault. Basically, the more people that ring in and complain, the faster it'll get fixed.

As Hugh says, you should be getting credits back on your bill as you're not getting what you're paying for. There's not much else you can do other than raising complaints and moving to another provider.

[joglynne]

I had the same problem.

I did as Hugh has suggested. I made sure my formal complaint was recorded on my account - which I double checked the next time I called. I found an existing thread,which even then had been active for over a year!! concerning my fault so kept up with what was (not) happening. With a great deal of persistence I also managed to get a credit of over 50% of my BB costs.

It was a couple of years ago so I hope the credit is now given for a reasonable period. I had to phone up every month to get mine which was a total pain and the way the fault end date was extended over and over again made me think there would be no resolution. My credit was extended for 6 months as a good will gesture when VM eventually sorted out the problem over three years from when it had started.