Alleged faulty cabinet

[lucavigg]

On Saturday (6th August), a VM engineer visited a house opposite to instal a new service. At the point where the connection has been made in the cabinet in the street, several houses lost broadband. Including ourselves. I wasn’t able to check whether we had lost television and telephone as well.

My wife spoke to the engineer in the street and he said that the cabinet appeared to have some problems and was susceptible to loosened connections inside. He also said that he had reconnected those cables that he thought were loose and our broadband returned a few minutes later.

While the engineer was still on site, our neighbour directly opposite, informed the engineer that his broadband was still not working. The engineer did not go back to the cabinet and recheck any connections and suggested that the partially exposed cable for the house, on the pavement may be damaged.

VM support continue to tell our neighbour that it is a “regional issue” affecting his Broadband and TV. To my knowledge, no one else in the street is offline. It just seems to be our neighbour.

Checking the service status for our street, there are no issues. Two planned outages on the 11th and 17th, which we have NOT BEEN INFORMED ABOUT BY EMAIL, once again.

Each time he calls, he is told it’s a regional issue and they’re trying to resolve it. It clearly isn’t.

What else should he do?

LV

[Natalie_L]

Hi lucavigg, 

Thank you for posting to us here on the Community. 

I am sorry to hear your neighbour is experiencing issues with their service. 

Can you please let us know if they have been able to speak to the team and get an update on whether this is a local outage or if they require a technician visit?

Thanks, 

[lucavigg]

They’ve got an engineer coming over today to have a look. I’m somewhat puzzled by Virgins describing the problem as regional. We’re quite close with our neighbours and I did a quick check. Nobody else we know was offline. 

the engineer that visited last Saturday to hook up a new customer mentioned that he felt the cabinet in the street was “suspect” and that he would report it for potential replacement. This seems to be sensible since we had a momentary outage when he was doing work at the cabinet to complete the new customer provisioning. When we told him we were down, he said that some of the connections were loose and that he had fixed them. 
Moments later we were back up. It’s possible the opposite neighbours connection remained off.

If you’d like address details and the number on the front of the cabinet, I’ll gladly DM them.

LV

[lucavigg]

So, <deep breath>. It turns out that my neighbour opposite lost his broadband and cable TV when his new next door neighbour had their broadband installed. The previous occupant of that house only had cable TV. When the engineer came to install broadband and cable TV, he used the connection for my neighbour opposite who has been there at that address for nearly 40 years and has been with virgin media since they were called Croydon cable, to provision services for the new occupant next door.

When the engineer was quizzed, last week about why the neighbour opposite had lost TV & BB, he said it must’ve been a fox chewing through the cable. Either that was a blatant lie or he didn’t put two and two together and realise that he had taken their shared cable for the new service, leaving them only with a phone. Presumably, he did this to save time digging up the garden to run the new cables.

Neighbour is back online with a temporary cable but they have to come back and bury a new one in his garden. He’s a quiet, unassuming man but I’ve never seen him so angry. He’s writing to someone high up to complain. 

Shambles.

[Gareth_L]

Thank you for the update lucavigg.

We can assure you this will be investigated once your neighbour has submitted his complaint.

Gareth_L