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owltimemvs's avatar
owltimemvs
On our wavelength
2 years ago

Complete preinstall disaster: unnecessary wayleave, postpones and questionable personal data handling

Good day lads, hope you all get better broadband service from virgin than I do at the moment considering I literally do not and cannot receive it 😆 I also hope that the service is worth it because preinstall has been nothing but a nightmare so far.

 

Had virgin xgs-pon go live on my street a month or so ago and signed up for installation via on-site rep who talked great deal about xgs-pon capabilities, like how it could achieve symmetric speeds and all that. Sadly rep failed to mention that those are hypothetical possibilities and virgin still offers 10:1 speed ratio even on xgs-pon 😐 what a disappointment. Even then unfortunately VM postponed install 3 times so far (and each time I had to ring our previous ISP to extend the service as we cancelled early because we thought we will be getting new ISP, but i eventually got back onto the rolling contract with them until this mess gets sorted) despite that the fibre box already been fitted to the front of the house after the first postpone.

 

After second postpone notice we phoned virgin because the box was already installed so the delays shouldn't have happened and they sent on-site engineer to see why installation isn't possible, which turned out to be a blockage up somewhere either on our or some other street which was known to be an issue after the first postpone. OK fair enough but this really should've been told upfront by a VM rep and not 2 weeks later by the on-site engineer.

 

2 weeks of delay go by and yet again i receive another 2 week postpone, and cherry on top is that they've sent me an email that my installation is actually postponed indefinitely despite the my virgin portal showing that my installation is still due late december but i digress.

 

As it happens to be for whatever reason the indefinite delay is because they need a permission in form of a 'Wayleave agreement' from one of the neighbours 2 houses up, and they actually asked us to go up to them, get their email address and then email their address to the residential wayleave team at virgin so they could reach them out.

 

To me this is complete nonsense. Neighbours house on the same street (which is a building up), and our house are not directly neighbouring (our wall is not connected to them), and our premises don't even intersect! Couple living there are not even our landlords either.

 

And why does virgin ask us to obtain our neighbours information? At best it's a bit silly they would rather send 3 different engineers to our premises to install services (yes, they've sent 2 different teams so far to lay the cable and install the box, with 3rd which would've been actual service installation inside the house) than to send 1 official rep to contact the neighbours about the agreements, and at worst they're delegating processing of personal information of other people (as they've asked for an email of our neighbours) onto us which should be none of our business and this should not be our problem at all.

 

I've rang the local VM rep and preinstall CS yesterday to try to solve this complete rubbish of a situation but the former did not pick up the phone and latter said that install engineer team should call back within 24 hours but to none of my surprise neither the rep or 'install engineer team' called back since.

 

Anyone have a clue as to how to unravel this mess and what to do now? I'm not asking my neighbours for their email or to sign a wayleave agreement because our premises, as I've said before are not within boundaries of each other and do not even intersect, nor do neighbours own the land around or on our premise. I do not see even why digging on their property is required to get broadband services on our premises? Virgin already dug on our premises to lay the cable and put the box on the wall of the house, no problems there. As far as I'm concerned the 'wayleave agreement' or any of the other permissions are not necessary here at all.

 

P.S As a funny little anecdote, the local VM rep back when helping us with filling the order talked smack about other FTTP provider in the area that was supposed to go live but did not 😆 Funny that, the other full fibre ISP might not have went live in due time but they did not promise or sell us the service they could not provide and they even explicitly stated to not cancel our current ISP services yet. Virgin on the other hand promised big and ended up giving bugger all with a headache! I have not even had actual services yet and it's already a pretty appalling experience.