Forum Discussion

Elm's avatar
Elm
Tuning in
28 days ago

Moving out of an XGS-PON area

I'm moving house, and started a move request via the website.  I was told to take my current router, and I'd be able to self install with no issues.

However, my current home was only cabled about 18 months ago, and is an XGS-PON area.  So I have a Hub 5X, with an optical fibre right to the router instead of the old DOCSIS setup with a coax inside your property.  

The new house is in a DOCSIS area, so having picked up the keys, I can see it's just a coax cable where the router will need to go.  The Hub 5X doesn't have a coax port.

Customer service have passed me to about 300 different teams, and keep trying to palm me off saying they can't help with a 'fault.'  I'm trying to get them to send me a Hub 5 for my 5X, so that I can actually use the service.

Does anyone have any hints....?

  • newapollo's avatar
    newapollo
    Very Insightful Person

    Hi Elm 

    Wishing you good luck and hope you'll be very happy when you move into your new property.

    The actual homemovers team should be able to help with the request to switch you to your new address including changing the hub to a hub 5.  It might be complicated due to the back end systems.

    You say that your current home was only cabled about 18 months ago.  How long do you have left on your current contract there?   Depending upon that and any early termination fees that may be due it might be an idea to cancel that account and then set up an account at the new address as a new customer so you can take advantage of the new customer pricing for the next 18 month (although there will be annual price increase each April to take into account)  

  • Hi Elm đź‘‹

    Welcome back to our Community Forums and thanks for your post.

    As newapollo has advised, our Home Movers team will be able to assist you with this.

    For more info on moving see 👉 here

    Let me know if you have any further questions and have a lovely weekend!

  • Hi Ayisha, the moving team haven’t been able to help. They don’t seem to understand the difference. They’ve just told me to take my existing router (which won’t work), and they’ve also said they’ll keep me on the same package, which isn’t available under DOCSIS (I’m on symmetric 1Gb). So far they’ve only succeeded in transferring me around multiple teams. I’m not sure why, but they’re suggesting that my next bill will be over ÂŁ200 too. I’m pretty unhappy with the “support” so far. 

    • -tony-'s avatar
      -tony-
      Alessandro Volta

      usual quality of help from the useless CS - try going to want to leave and giving 30 days notice that usually concentrates minds - it may get you to a UK agent who is likely to be more helpful 

      • Elm's avatar
        Elm
        Tuning in

        That might be worthwhile; it's a full fibre area, so rather than downgrading to Gig1 asymmetric under DOCSIS with old cable routing, I could go for a fresh install with a fibre provider.  Vodafone's offering 1.6Gb for half the price of Virgin.

    • Ayisha_B's avatar
      Ayisha_B
      Forum Team

      I'm going to pop you a PM so I can take a closer look at the account.

      Thanks!

  • nodrogd's avatar
    nodrogd
    Very Insightful Person

    My understanding is that the retrofit fibre build is very close to going live in most existing DOCSIS areas. Only the local area managers will know if the existing package can be moved as is.

    This is one for the Forum Team to delve deeper into.

    • Cardiffman282's avatar
      Cardiffman282
      Trouble shooter

      Yup I've been told in the next three months by VM network engineers in Cardiff. 

  • Elm's avatar
    Elm
    Tuning in

    I'm adding to this thread again with some more information for anyone who comes across it.  It's now 2 weeks since my Quickstart installation date, and I've got no connectivity at all.  I've made half a dozen calls to customer service, a couple of threads here, and I've had 2 engineer visits in that time.

    The issue appears to still be with my account.  Your account is much more than just a username and password; it's all the configuration data for your router and your 'place' on the VM wider network.  The most recent engineer who visited was excellent, but couldn't do anything as all the hardware and infrastructure is absolutely fine.  

    What he suspects and has escalated is that when my new account was created as part of the moving house request, someone has basically 'copied and pasted' all my account details from the XGS account to the DOCSIS one.  That means the DOCSIS Hub is receiving data that an XGS Hub would expect, and it doesn't know what to do with it.  The result is no WAN IP allocation, and dozens and dozens of strange critical failures in the network log.  

    He said one of the numbered errors is 10998, which is rare or unusual.  The escalation is to some internal team who will have to spend some time rebuilding my account, or hopefully deleting it and starting again.

    My complaint at this stage is still twofold; firstly that the customer service on the phone is so awful, that any contact with them means they order an engineer which I now realise pauses or cancels any extant tickets, and actually sets you back.  This means the 4-5 days I've been waiting for an engineer, no work has been done on fixing my account. 

    The second issue is that this is all completely opaque; there's no contact from VM about this ticket, there's no confirmation that it's being worked on, or that anyone is handling it; as of the engineer leaving, it's complete silence.  If I call to ask, I'll end up with another engineer booked, or the awful CS team deleting a ticket or causing more issues.  If I don't call to ask, how long am I meant to sit staring at error codes and hoping that someone fixes it?