What to do when internet goes down

[Jeni]

Earlier this week (Monday) we had a problem with our internet and of course I then realised we had no telephone either as we were changed to a digital line via the Hub last year.  So I thought I would use my old PAYG mobile - not a smartphone sadly - and found that the call to report this fault took 17 minutes with all the taped messages and the final result was that I was sent a link to a website to report the fault, which of course I could not use. To add insult to injury the call to VM actually wiped out all my remaining credit too! So we were completely stuck without any means of contacting the outside world.   Luckily I realised that one of my neighbours was also a VM customer and they kindly let me make a call to VM from their house. I was less than thrilled to be offered an engineer appointment this Friday - and I pointed out that we were supposedly registered as vulnerable customers (old age, medical condition).  A VM engineer was then booked for Tuesday - did not turn up - so I phoned again and got told Friday again but then they relented and said an engineer will come today but cannot give you a time.  He turned up an hour later and corrected the fault.  He was brilliant and explained the fault was on the VM box up the road.

Sorry, long winded story, but to illustrate how cut off you are if you do not have a smartphone as back-up.  We do not have one, have never considered we needed one and only use an old mobile phone in case of emergency.  Can anyone suggest a solution to this please?  There was mention of another box which would allow telephone calls to be made if the internet went down (?Emergency Backup Line?) but this was not offered to us when we changed to the digital line and I thought we can call 999 on our old mobile if we needed to.  Does anyone know if it would also enable us to call VM to report a fault and book an engineer if we need to in future?  If so, how do we get one.

Thanks for any help and any suggestions on how to dealwith this.

[legacy1]

as backup get something like this

Zyxel 5G NR/LTE 4x4 MIMO Indoor Router | 5 Gbps Data Rate | AX1800 WiFi 6 Up To 64 Clients | WAN Fai...

[Jeni]

Thanks for the suggestion - but how would this help if it is a fault on the VM line coming from the box up the road to my Hub?  It was not a fault on my router on anything else inside my house.  Plus to be honest the equipment you have suggested would cost nearly £400.

[Ilyas_Y]

Thanks for the reply @Jeni on the Virgin Media forums. 👋🏼

Unfortunately if the services goes down due to a fault in the area or on the line then backup equipment will not work to resolve the matter.

Kind regards,
Ilyas.

[Jeni]

Thanks Ilyas.  I had not expected to be able to make any calls if there was a fault in the area - this would affect my neighbour too of course and I would then expect VM to know about it and be working to fix it.  I am just a bit surprised and concerned to find that if it is just us that has a problem then there is absolutely nothing we can do, except rely on our neighbour to be in and not away for a couple of week's holiday!  We do know another lady who just has VM phone and TV, no internet.  She has one of the Emergency boxes fitted as she has health issues, so I thought that maybe the line operated via her TV connection or via a mobile connection and was not reliant on having internet connection at all.  During our problem over the last week we had full TV service - it was just the internet and telephone affected.

[Ilyas_Y]

Thanks for the reply @Jeni 🧾

The area faults will be dealt with VM directly as the reports grow - then an area ticket is raised and the fix time is given by the network engineers depending on the size and the scale of the faults.
In relation to single line faults or single property faults, they need to be reported in so we can get a log down and try to resolve them remotely or through an engineer booking, if a customer has any mark on the account as a priority customer then we will be able to attend sooner.

Kind regards,
Ilyas.

[Roger_Gooner · Accepted solution]

Some VM customers are entitled to an EBUL, a phone which is connected to the hub and has a rechargeable battery. In the event of a network or power failure the phone can make a call using the SIM card inside it to, I believe, a few numbers such as 999, 112, 150, 111 and other key services like gas and electricity priority numbers, but you cannot call your neighbour or care company. You can see what this EBUL V3 looks like on page 38 of the phone guide.

http://www.virginmedia.com/phoneguide 

[Jeni]

@Roger_Gooner - Thanks for this info.  I shall have to enquire further whether this will solve our problem or not. But if it connects your phone in an emergency via mobile network to 150 then hopefully it will.  Our main problem last week was that I had no way of knowing whether it was a general outage or just us and then had no way to contact VM to order an engineer visit.

[nodrogd]

One of the EBUL V3 modifications was the ability to call numbers other than emergency numbers, so this should suffice to make calls if the internet fails or the power goes off. A smart phone is not always the answer, as during power cuts only the larger mobile sites have power backup to drive the 4G mobile data services. Voice services are usually unaffected as 2G mobile requires far less backup power.

[Jeni]

@nodrogd - Thank you for the info