Forum Discussion

greyman's avatar
greyman
Fibre optic
19 days ago

Area 30 Outage

I'm not sure of the extent of the "area" that is currently suffering this issue, but since sometime in the mid afternoon yesterday, I have had no broadband, voice or interactive TV services.

Apparently, their engineers are currently working on the issue, so I guess the services will be back when they're back, but my main concern has been the timing and content of the update SMS messages and the general dismissive nature of my contact with "Customer Services".

So far, I have had three update messages, each giving an estimated time for a fix, each of which has expired by at least two hours before the next message arrives.  The latest estimate was for 31/1/2025 06:40:00, which I'd taken as this morning, but the chat agent I've just spoken to appears to have misread it as 6:40PM. They do appear to struggle a bit with times and there doesn't appear to be any consistency on the format used, with AM/PM sometimes creeping in.   It might give the impression that they're being deliberately obtuse.

On the subject of my brief interaction with the agent, she basically ignored the 12 hour difference between the time in the text and her reading of their system and then just copy/pasted a script about it being an area fault and that their engineers were working on it and then just left the chat.  For some reason, I didn't get a feedback request, which I think you'd guess, wouldn't have been overly positive.   

It'd be really nice to know more about the issue and particularly exactly when it is going to be fixed.

Both BT and another fibre broadband provider have recently installed infrastructure in my street, so VM no longer have a monopoly on superfast broadband.   Some interesting decisions ahead for when my contract nears expiry.  Surely the competitors' customer service can't be as bad as this, or can it? 

  • The latest "estimated" time was 12:01pm and there is still no sign of a fix.

    I'm guessing that they just keep posting short estimated times, when they already know that it's going to be a multiple day fix.  That way, affected customers will perhaps be discouraged from registering their loss of service and therefore not be eligible for compensation.

    I registered and I would recommend anyone else affected to do the same, if they haven't already, as I suspect that the fix will happen sometime next week, after a load of further missed estimated time updates.

  • Their latest 16:40 estimate has just about confirmed my suspicions. 

    How can a technician(s) provide an estimate, four times, and miss every one, with 18 hours between the first and last?

    They're either very poor at diagnosing and/or fixing faults or VM are deliberately misleading their customers, to avoid paying the compensation from the scheme, that they claim to be so keen on.

    Bottom line, if you have yet to register a loss of service, do so without delay.

    • jpeg1's avatar
      jpeg1
      Alessandro Volta

      It's not the technicians at fault, they are out in the street doing their job. 

      The problem is with the broken VM system which just keeps pushing out imaginary updates until the fault has been fixed. 

  • Are you in NG19? I’m not sure what my area code is but my broadband went down yesterday at about 17:40 and it has just come back on, despite them saying it won’t be fixed until 16:40.

     

  • Yup NG19 is in area 30, or at least it was the last time I looked. We've just got in from walking the dog and not needing to restart my mobile tethering was  a good clue that a fix had been applied.

    It would appear that my "conspiracy theory" might have been just that, although if those "finger in the air" estimates are being pushed out automatically, that is definitely something that could do with changing.

    The status had yet to be updated, but I guess that's not a major issue.

  • Yes I noticed the 3 hours being added to the fix time each time it was not achieved. I also received a text at 8:10 this morning saying that they had fixed the issue but in fact they hadn’t fixed the issue!

    I got another email today saying that it would be fixed by 1640 and it was fixed a lot sooner than that… but I haven’t had another text to tell me that it has been fixed 

     

    • greyman's avatar
      greyman
      Fibre optic

      If you had looked at the status via the page in My VM, the latest estimated time was 4:01pm, so different from the texts that both you and I had received with 1640 as the time.

      There were also similar differences between the online and SMS versions for all of the other estimates, so not sure what's going on there.

  • In the post above i said I received an email but it was a text I received, just to be accurate . For some reason you don’t seem to be able to edit your own posts any more.

     

  • Just received a text from Virgin saying the issue is now fixed….. 5 hours after it was actually fixed !!