Engineer Destroyed My Connection

[SRR500]

I could go on about the terrible service I have had since May, but will get straight to the latest fiasco.

Saw a Virgin engineer outside our block of flats looking at our connection box (which is in a terrible state, more on that later) on Tuesday morning. He said was here on another job, but would mention it to the "external engineer working at other end of block".

An hour later I saw both the engineers up a ladder looking at the connection box at other end of block and a black box at ground level with doors open. 

At about 3pm Tuesday I received a notification from the My Virgin Media app informing me "Great news, the network problems in your area have been fixed" blah, blah, blah. This was not reported by me.

As I said earlier I've had months of problems, but for the last few weeks all has been good. 

Here is my BQM from Monday, a bank holiday. So lots of streaming and gaming.

 

Here is my BQM from the Tuesday I saw engineers.

 

Wednesday's BQM

 

And today's Thursday

 

You can literally pinpoint the moment on Tuesday I received the "Great news" message to when the connection went rubbish. 

I play games online in the evening, but since Tuesday this is impossible due to my upload speed bouncing from .3mb to 10mb every minute and constant warnings of "high packet loss". I'm on the 250mb service.

Have tried rebooting router (as you can see about midnight) but has made no difference.

Please can this be looked into urgently, as whatever the engineers did on Tuesday has not gradually got better after a few days, which I know from experience is the normal response. 

[Client62]

Call Customer Support on 150 or 0345 454 1111 from a non-VM phone & log your connection fault.

[Steven_L · Accepted solution]

Hey SRR500,

Welcome to the community and thanks for taking the time to post here on the forums.
I’m sorry to hear of the issues that you’re having with your connection at the moment, I have looked further into this and can see that there is an SNR issue in your area that was logged on Wednesday 30th August and currently has an estimated fix time of 12pm on Monday 4th September, Please let us know if you have any further issues after this date and time and we will be able to investigate further for you.

Kind Regards,

Steven_L

[SRR500]

Hiya Steven,

Thanks for reply. I thought things were getting better on Sunday, but as you can see Monday was a fiasco and today is the same.  

Sunday BQM

 Monday BQM

In fact things were so bad at 11pm Monday night the Xbox could not even detect an upload signal at all.

I hope you can help with this please.

Also I  really need this all logged for a refund/discount on bill as the service is unusable.

As I said in original post I've had a terrible service for months now with DL speeds of 40mb whilst paying for 250mb, but I still had a decent upload speed, so could play games online. All seemed to be good for the last couple of weeks of August and then this hit.

Thanks, Ralph 

[Kath_P]

Hi SRR500, 

Thanks for coming back to us on this and for giving us an update. 

Checking things this end, the outage is an SNR outage - 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. Due to this and the work involved, it can take some time for a resolution to be found I'm afraid. 

The latest estimated fix is the 8th September at 12pm. We'll have no further updates on the fault until then. 

In the meantime, the fault is logged on your account so it will automatically be assessed for compensation once the fault is closed. You can read more on this here. 

Apologies for the inconvenience once again. 

[SRR500]

Hiya Kath,

Not been in touch for a while, but the service over the last few months has been reliably rubbish. But today I feel new a level of ineptitude has been achieved.

As before, online gaming has been impossible for the last 2 weeks (bqm pictures are exactly the same as ones in previous posts). The online checks confirmed a fault as usual and the "Technicians are on the case" message as usual. Date for repair has been changing over the last 10 days but was supposed to be 18.00pm on 22/11. At 17.40pm  on 22/11 I received this latest update.

 Today at 11.30am I received not 1, not 2, but 3 messages to inform me the issue is fixed as they were so pleased it would seem.

 

This is my latest bqm.

 They fixed it for a whole 4 hours. Well done. What did they use...A Pritt Stick?

This is after 2 weeks of a service that is not fit for purpose. Yes, I can get online and stream a film, but online gaming is impossible and I'm sure you would agree this is a very important part of today's internet connections. Virgins adverts are always using online gaming as a selling point. 

Please can you firstly look into the so called "Outage Update" being fixed and maybe suggest they try Superglue instead of the Pritt Stick.

And also once again I have to mention compensation for a service that is completely unfit for service, and has been on and off for most of the year. The latest 2 weeks being just the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks Ralph.

[Molly_T]

Hi SRR500 👋 Thanks for getting back to us!

Sorry to hear that you continued to have issues with your service, and that an outage has been particularly affecting you. 
Since posting it looks as though this outage has now been resolved, and you have had no further disconnections in the past 48hours. Hopefully this means that the issues with your service have been resolved alongside the outage, but if not please do return and give us another update. We will be happy to take a closer look at things again if needed!

In terms of compensation you are covered by our auto-compensation scheme which assesses and applies compensation automatically for outages whenever possible. However, I do appreciate you have not had the best experience and so will send you a PM to confirm a few account details so we can get a complaint raised with a record of your feedback and offer further support. 

You can find the PM in the top right corner of the page in your Inbox. 📩 We can then return to this public thread with another update when possible. Thank you for your patience in the meantime!

Wishing you all the best. 🌞