Broadband connection down since Sunday - M4

[Aidanjalali]

Hi. Just thought I'd post on here to see if I could get an actual response from someone at Virgin, rather than the 'There is an issue in your area' generic feedback on the service status page.

Our broadband connection has been completely dead since Sunday and the fix date/time just keeps getting pushed back. I was wondering if I could get a response as to why this is and an actual ETA of when it might be fixed? I'm currently having to USB tether to get my work done, but my data isn't unlimited and eventually I'm going to start losing out on money if I have to put my contracts on hold. There are a bunch of houses in the area that have also lost connection since Sunday.

[Aylintara]

Surprisingly at this age of technology this is found to be normal. Very embarrassing. Now we know who not use use/recommend. 

[carl_pearce]

---

@Aylintara wrote:

Surprisingly at this age of technology this is found to be normal. Very embarrassing. Now we know who not use use/recommend. 

---

Any ISP can have issues, not just VM.

Hence the need for a backup connection, especially when you work from home on a residential internet connection.

[Aidanjalali]

---

@carl_pearce wrote:

---

@Aylintara wrote:

Surprisingly at this age of technology this is found to be normal. Very embarrassing. Now we know who not use use/recommend. 

---

Any ISP can have issues, not just VM.

Hence the need for a backup connection, especially when you work from home on a residential internet connection.

---

I fully expect that there might be downtime, and am fine with it. What I don't appreciate is the constant pushback of estimated fix dates/times - it means I can't sort out adequate arrangements for an alternative connection without overpaying. Some of this system is clearly automated when it shouldn't be (for example, saying an engineer is on-site for a fix *immediately after* the internet has gone down and we've registered an outage).

[jem101]

---

@Aidanjalali wrote:

---

@carl_pearce wrote:

---

@Aylintara wrote:

Surprisingly at this age of technology this is found to be normal. Very embarrassing. Now we know who not use use/recommend. 

---

Any ISP can have issues, not just VM.

Hence the need for a backup connection, especially when you work from home on a residential internet connection.

---

I fully expect that there might be downtime, and am fine with it. What I don't appreciate is the constant pushback of estimated fix dates/times - it means I can't sort out adequate arrangements for an alternative connection without overpaying. Some of this system is clearly automated when it shouldn't be (for example, saying an engineer is on-site for a fix *immediately after* the internet has gone down and we've registered an outage).

---

Oh yes, you have successfully recognised the lies, dysfunctional nature of VM’s fault reporting system’s. 

The constant changes on fix times etc, is down to the fact that they simply don’t know, the oft mentioned ‘an engineer is on route’, or ‘an engineer is on-site’, gives an impression of someone barrelling down the motorway with a boot load of spare parts or a highly trained person peering into a cabinet and working out what has failed, and they are prepared to work 24/7 until it is fixed!

The truth, alas is somewhat different.

All that had happened is that VM have acknowledged an issue and it has been added to a job queue. At some point in the future a, no doubt overworked, engineer will find that your particular issue has bubbled to the top of their job queue and they’ll take a look at it. Might be trivially easy to fix, might not be.

Who can tell?

Sorry but you weren’t expecting a quick fix, were you?

[Aidanjalali]

> Sorry but you weren’t expecting a quick fix, were you?

Having been with Virgin Media before in a previous house, having to wait 3/4 months for my connection issues to get fixed... nope, not really. Unfortunately where I live, it's a choice between a stable 16mb connection or an unstable 200mb connection, so I've really no choice but to roll with the punches (since 16mb would be far too slow for my work).

Again, all I'd really ask for is better management of expectations. I *still* have no idea if my internet will be down again, despite it being currently fixed, because this already happened on Thursday. Do I now have to buy a new SIM with more data on the off-chance that my internet goes down again? As a contractor I really can't afford that extra expense on top of the extortionate amount that I'm already being charged for a flaky connection.

[Ilyas_Y]

Thanks for getting back to us on the forums @Aidanjalali.

I've had a look and I can see that an SNR fault has been raised on the profile which is what is causing the connection issue, I am sorry to see that on there as a continuation from the last check 😞

SNR (signal to noise ratio). This is just a technical term for interference of the Broadband signal caused by noise which ingresses on to our network. It's a difficult problem to locate and diagnose. This is because noise can ingress anywhere on our network. As a general rule it's normally caused by customer equipment e.g. loose connections or 3rd party equipment attached to our network. However it can also be attributable to local architecture, e.g street cabinets, cabling or at the origin of the signal which we call the Headend (servers/routing system).
  
The only way to establish where the noise is originating is for the Network Techs to run a series of trace routes. Once found then the cause dictates he amount of work required and the time frame for resolution.

The ticket number for this fault is: F010402527.
There is an estimated repair time for today at 16:00 hours.

Check back then and let us know how it is!

Kind regards,
Ilyas.