Forum Discussion

lowmtr's avatar
lowmtr
Tuning in
7 months ago

Hub 3 "Rogue Config", cycling every 15 minutes, Broadband down for months

Looking for any community input or pointers. Broadband had been stable for many months, back around April the Hub 3 started cycling every 15 mins, restarting, logging T3 errors, the occasional kernel panic but the fault was solid. Initially the Hub3 was running in modem mode with a downstream Deco router, but putting back to router mode made no difference. To cut a long story short, the Hub 3 was changed multiple times, several site visits by Virgin resulted in cable to the house being changed and finally an underground cable in a neighbours property was also changed. This didn't help but all of a sudden one night at around 1am the issue disappeared and for the next couple of months it ran fine, no cycling and internet speed good at 350mbs. However the hub3 stopped responding to pings, so the BQM stopped working and at some point the IP address changed but all was left as it was working and presumed fixed. However last week the Hub3 was powered off and the problem reappeared. Another virgin engineer attended site, said that he had just come from another customer (apparently on the same network equipment) and both of us had the same issues, an issue which he had not seen in the last 10 years. He talked about the signal integrity being perfect but the router not being assigned consecutive channels properly. Whilst onsite he referred the issue to the "Network Team", told us he could do nothing else at his level and we'd get an update soon. That was days ago, broadband is down (each cycle of the router every 15 minutes drops every connection so its as good as useless).

To me it appears like there is a rogue network config being randomly assigned, we have no control over it, we might get it, we might not, a power cycle might clear it, it might not. If anyone has any idea of what is going on, or how to get the "Network Team" to respond  and more importantly fix it I'd be very appreciative.

  • Sounds like a similar issue i've started to experience of the past week. I'm not impressed with Virgin's handling of the tech issues and always blame us the customer for these.

    Good luck getting a solid answer from VM, i'm keeping an eye on your post.

  • > I'm not impressed with Virgin's handling of the tech issues 

    I agree, its absolutely shocking, they seemed to have just given up caring. So the BQM reports that at 9pm last night Virgin did something and the link had been up since, who knows how what they did, how long it might work or what the issue actually is. There has been zero follow up since the engineer visit on the 21st June (confirming that its a Virgin network problem, its now referred to the mystical network team and there is nothing he could do). We will be pursuing compensation but at this point since we have zero communication from Virgin we don't know if/when it will fail again. Worse than useless.

    • Molly_T's avatar
      Molly_T
      Forum Team

      Hi Lowmtr πŸ‘‹

      Welcome to the community forum! Thanks for posting. 

      So sorry to hear about all of these recent issues with your service, and your experience in getting things sorted. We appreciate it must be frustrating, given how long this has been ongoing and the steps taken so far to get things resolved. 

      I'd like to take a closer look at what's currently happening with the connection, so we can offer further support if needed (and chase things up with the networks team if you are still having issues!) I will just need to send you a PM to confirm a few account details to arrange this for you.

      You can find the PM in the top right corner of the page in your Inbox. πŸ“© We can then return to this public thread with another update when possible. Thank you for your patience in the meantime!

      Wishing you all the best. 🌞

       

      • lowmtr's avatar
        lowmtr
        Tuning in

        Thanks for this, have supplied all required information. Still absolutely no follow up received from Virgin Media as a result of the not very succesfull engineer site visit and referral to the "network team".

         

  • goslow's avatar
    goslow
    Alessandro Volta

    Formal complaint to VM first of all requesting compensation for the bad service (make a realistic assessment of what is 'reasonable').

    https://www.virginmedia.com/help/complaints

    This is most likely to be met with a gobbledegook 'resolution' and no compensation.

    The formal complaint to VM is, however, a required first step before escalating to the ombudsman via the process and timescales below

    https://www.commsombudsman.org/our-process

    For further info speak to Citizens Advice as there will also be aspects of consumer law which will apply as VM has failed to provide the service you are paying for.

    • Gareth_L's avatar
      Gareth_L
      Forum Team

      Hello lowmtr

      Thanks for your post. 
      Sorry to hear about the issue with your current hub3.
      I can look into this for you and see if we can get this resolved,
      If you don't mind, I will need to send you a private message to pass security. 
      If you can check the Logo top right of your screen that would be great. 
      Regards     
      Gareth_L
       

  • legacy1's avatar
    legacy1
    Alessandro Volta

    Like VM don't have logs showing them how bad your connection was! its sad if VM only compensate when fully offline😞 

  • jpeg1's avatar
    jpeg1
    Alessandro Volta

    I don't know what VM signed up to with Ofcom in terms of compensation, but I can’t imagine that Ofcom would say a service being interrupted every 15 minutes is acceptable.

    Certainly make a formal complaint and press for compensation for loss of service. 

    • lowmtr's avatar
      lowmtr
      Tuning in

      Thanks everyone (other than Virgin of course!) for the support and advice. To be honest I've just had it with Virgin Media, they never did properly handle, update, root cause or even bother with the courtesy of any sort of formal or informal response to the multiple support calls. If it wasn't for Molly on the forum it would have been deathly silence. Unbelievably Virgin management only got involved at the end to want to argue that the months of outage with 15 minute link recycling was not a "total loss of service". Take a  look at the BQM above and try and argue that with a straight face πŸ™‚

      So as I see it either Virgin management don't understand the business they are meant to be managing or (sadly as I suspect) they honestly don't care about their customer experience. Their primary focus is just to manage support costs, which presumably, is why they don't handle the support calls properly and drive their annoying customers to this community to go sort themselves out, at no direct costs to themselves. 

      Either way, it tells me all I need to know about Virgin Media, I'm done with them, moving on as soon as possible and before the problem comes back again!  Best of luck anyone unlucky enough to hit this problem!

  • jpeg1's avatar
    jpeg1
    Alessandro Volta

    I think you have summed up VM's business case pretty well.

    Of course know their customer service is the worst in the business, they have been told this by OFCOM. But it's the way they have chosen, and they just don't care.