Broken Cable

[Allie-B]

On the 4th April Cadent very helpfully cut through our Virgin Cable while replacing steel gas pipes.

I immediately contacted Virgin Customer support and reported a total loss.  They said an engineer would be out on the 17th April.  I asked them if this was the first available date and they confirmed this to be the case, which at the time I thought was a bit ridiculous.

On the 17th two engineers turned up, but they said there was nothing they could do.  They had been booked to do an internal re-wire...  and they weren't the correct team to do an external cable fix.  I said I had reported a total loss and they said that wasn't what the job was booked as.

They rebooked the job for me and apologised.

Over the next three days a vareity of engineers came and went and finally we were re-instated on the 20th April.

16 days without any Phone, TV or broadband due to no fault of ours.

We asked telephone support if we were entitled to compensation and were informed that we weren't.

I find this very suprising as part of the reason it took so long to repair was the job being incorrectly booked in the first place, let alone it was a third party that cut the cable initally.

It is even more annoying that we have been billed for a full month - even though for more than half of it we had no connection.

[Allie-B]

Hmm

[goslow]

You are entitled to compensation.

VM gets two clear working days to fix the fault. If they fail to do that, you get an initial £9.33 for that 'payment trigger time'. Thereafter you get £9.33 per full calendar day with no service.

If the cable was cut on 4/4/23 and restored on 20/4/23 the calculation would be

4/4/23 to 6/4/23 - Payment trigger time £9.33
7/4/23 to 19/4/23 inc. 13 days @ £9.33
20/4/23 service restored

14 payments @ £9.33 = £130.62

VM has to credit your account within 30 days of the fault being fixed

It does not matter that it was Cadent who damaged the cable. The compensation still applies (para 41 at the link below)

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0026/216962/Industry-Code-of-Practice-for-Automatic-...

There are some limited exclusions whereby VM is expempt from paying (para 40 above)

A popular one which VM likes to use regularly is 'council permits' (to dig in the street). VM may reduce its compensation only for any delay waiting for the council. VM often likes to try to blame 'council delays', in topics described on here, where, in fact, the delays are generally caused by VM's broken sub-contracting arrangements.

You will get a reply from the forum team within a few days.

They may offer to help or raise a complaint for you. The VM complaints process is largely pointless it would seem based on examples of 'resolutions' posted on here. In which case you would need to escalate to Ombudsman Services for arbitration (following their processes and timescales)

https://www.ombudsman-services.org/

[VMUser1812]

Now, I’d love to hear what the ‘excuse’ was for why you aren’t entitled to compensation for no service!

Month had more than 28 days, CEO’s dog unfortunately ate the paperwork, ‘well actually you are, but we have been told to lie to all customers in an attempt to save the company some money’!

Tempted to not entirely dismiss the last one!

[Allie-B]

Their excuse on the phone was, as it wasn't our (VM) fault that the cable was cut then they weren't liable for compensation.

I even said that surely as they booked the call incorrectly which added delays to the process they must have some accountability.

Phone agent said no.

Hence the post 😞

[Kain_W]

Hi there Allie-B,

Thanks for your post and welcome back to the community.

Many apologies for the issues faced regarding this, if this has not been automatically placed on the account then our team would raise a manual review.

Has a complaint already been raised on the account?
Regards,

[Allie-B]

Hi,

thanks for the response.  No formal complaint has been raised yet.

[Kain_W]

Thanks for the response there, 

So we can get this raised I've dropped you a PM to discuss further.

The message will appear within the purple envelope icon.

Regards,

[Kain_W]

Thanks for your cooperation over PM Allie-B,

The credit has now been applied to the account for you.

If you do have anymore queries then be sure to pop back up for further assistance. 

Regards,

[Allie-B]

Thanks for the help