Zak, I am sure you are trying to be helpful. However have you really read this thread? How many times have I been asked to reset the modem and how many times has that made any difference? Hint: Lots and none.
Frankly this is all getting a bit insulting and the only reason I am keeping this reply polite is that I don't want this thread deleted by some moderator.
- I have been having faults almost daily and had to put up not being able to rely on my broadband for over 8 months.
- I get told that, despite this, I still have to pay over the odds for my service (compared to any new customer) as it is not classified as a permanent fault.
- Every time I raise it I get told "we have checked the line and all looks in good shape", reset your modem (yeh, right. Like that fixed it last time??)
- Then I get an engineer sent out who (every time) says he can find nothing wrong so it must be a network fault. So it gets escalated. But not fixed.
The local engineer is excellent, friendly, helpful and even called me back in his spare time when he found a way of detecting the faults. The rest of VM? I am not sure my opinion is printable!
So lets recap what we know.
1) The fault is between me and the first local hop with the VM network (as seen by a tracert, and confirmed by ping monitors, incoming and outgoing)
2) It is NOT my modem (it has been replaced) and a reboot/reset makes no difference
3) It generally occurs between 4 and 6pm on weekday evenings. (Hint, I suspect this is when local network loading increases, kids home from school etc.) On saturdays and sundays it happens less often or at other times of the day.
4) Signal levels/SNR at my modem are fine.
5) The engineer managed to detect similar faults on customers from my local cabinet, at the times I reported faults. However at that time the standard line test showed no problem. So the issue looks to be at my local cabinet or further into the VM network. Unfortunately I don't know what tool he used to detect these faults but I think it logged resync or reconnect events from the modem/router.
6) I don't think I have had a week where I have had less than 3 days of faults, often it is every day.
So, given all that, is defies believe that a company like VM does not have a better way of diagnosing faults than the "we checked the line and it is ok now". Without any real knowledge of VMs network I can set up ping logs and show exactly when and roughly where (ie fairly local to me) the fault is. Surely VM, with your understanding of the local network, can do better? If you have nothing better, set up ping logs to all your customers on my local cabinet. Monitor them for a week or so. That will tell you if it is everyone or just a few of us with a problem. Assuming everyone, work back through your local network to isolate what part has the fault. Then fix it!
It isn't rocket science you know!!
