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.
