Virgin Media Community

[Mrfuzzywig]

Hi all, again....

After over 2 months of this and 4/5 engineer visits i am still no closer to getting this sorted. All the engineer visits (including a network engineer which im not including in the total as he never stepped inside the house) confirmed it was a problem with the VM network in my area. Each time they raise a fault ticket to get this looked at and each time the ticket is closed by someone else without the issue being solved. This is annoying me and the engineers to the point on the last visit i had the same engineer again and all we could do is laugh about how absurd this is becoming, especially in the current climate and the unneeded contact it is causing. Can someone please update me if there is any fault ticket open for me or if like a suspect this has once again been closed. 

[Andruser]

Possibly the cause is over-utilisation, in which case VM often close off complaints because there's nothing they can or will do, since there's more data traffic than the local equipment can handle, but it is expensive and difficult to increase capacity and rarely gives positive returns on investment.  As over-utilisation is invariably a self inflicted injury for VM by virtue of selling more contracts in an area than they have the capacity to support, they are sometimes (not always) very cagey about admitting to these issues.  I believe VM had a telling off from Ofcom a few years back about this, and promised to make sure they aren't selling contracts that the equipment can't deliver, in practice whatever checks are in place aren't always working.

You confirm (or deny) if this is the case by visiting Thinkbroadband.com creating an account and setting up a Broadband Quality Monitor.  Let that run for 24-48 hours and then publish a link back here.  If it doesn't show the normal over-utilisation fingerprint, it may still offer some insight into the extent and possible causes of your problem.  If it does show over-utilisation, then its time to start thinking about a different ISP, because the normal "fix" is to wait for sufficient customers to leave in order to bring the local network back within its capacity, and this can take months, and occasionally years.

[Mrfuzzywig]

I am quite confident it is a utilisation issue, I have been part of many of the threads on this forum already. My BQM which has been running for 2.5months all but confirms this. My main point problem is with them, VM, continuing to waste mine and the engineer time by closing the tickets and then resending engineers out just to reopen them and confirm the issues is with the network. The positive however, I finally got a call from VM from someone called Nigel who was very helpful and apologetic about this whole shambles. He could see all the tickets being opened and closed without explanation as to why they had been closed without being fixed. He escalated it to his area manager and got me a new high priority fault ticket F008080460 with estimate fix date of afternoon today. We shall see but its nice to know there are at least a few competent people at VM even if the majority seem to be jobsworths (not including the front line engineers, all of them i met had been decent guys and had been getting just as annoyed about the mess as I was). 

[Andruser]

Most of VM's UK staff are a credit to the company, but organisationally it is a shambles of broken processes, flawed information flows, inadequate communication.  Over time, VM management have allowed the company to become a huge Cat-in-the-Hat mess, and once things reach that stage it is very difficult to sort things out.  They then compound that with the dreadful offshore outsourced call centres.

Regarding the new ticket, I hope it fixes things - but that depends on where the bottleneck is.  if its very local at CMTS level, that is probably too expensive relative to the benefits to justify fixing and there's probably no options to route traffic differently, and I'd therefore expect no fix.  If it is upstream of the CMTS, then there might be traffic routing solutions that can solve things through "simple" (meaning "not really simple at all") configuration changes to VM's switches or there may even be investment actions that do pay off for VM (but unless already budgeted and planned, actual investment is rarely quick).