I’ve had it with virgin

[Kfred]

This is the worse experience I’ve ever had with broadband and regret renewing my contract with virgin. For the past month there has been no/intermittent internet. All trouble shooting has been tried and virgin site advises it’s an issue in the area. There have been dates since the beginning of the month advising when it will be fixed but it never gets fixed. I’ve made 3 complaints now and almost everyday for the past 10 days I’ve been speaking to virgin where they advise the issue will be fixed. I work from home and have to use my phone hot spot in order to work. I’ve registered loss of service twice but the option is no longer there. I think what annoys me the most is the lies that it will be fixed when it won’t and hasn’t been fixed. What exactly am I paying for. I’m so grateful that when I upgraded my phone with three network that I picked unlimited internet as I would not be able to work now if I hadn’t. 

[goslow]

Some of these area problems can drag on for months.

Are you tracking your connection with a BQM

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality

to see if that records the problems you are experiencing?

You need to be building up a collection of evidence, over time, of the ongoing problems (along with captures of service status reports, notification texts emails etc.) and VM's failures to fix. This will help you as evidence to escalate to the ombudsman (either for compensation for poor service or request to leave VM with no EDF etc. etc., depending on what course of action you want to take).

[jbrennand]

What "exactly" is being reported on the “free & automated” Service Status number - 0800 561 0061 - which usually always gives the most up to date info. and tells you of more local issues and fix estimates, down to street cab/postcode level.

[Kath_F]

Hi Kfred,

We're sorry to hear about the issues you have been having with your broadband connection. 😔

Checking our systems, I can see that there is a fault open that is affecting you. The details of that are here: 

• ➡ Fault reference number: F011338825
• ➡ Estimated fix time: 26 JUN 2024 09:00
• ➡ Description: Status report  ||  You might find that your Virgin Fibre, Voice and Virgin TV services are intermittent, with the picture freezing or disappearing now and then. We are sorry and our engineers are working hard to resolve this for you.

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. 

There is a note of this on your account so the relevant teams are aware you are affected and this will ensure the account is assessed automatically for automatic compensation once the fault is closed as resolved. You can view more information on this, as well as the eligibility criteria here 👉 Automatic Compensation

If there is anything else we can do, let us know. 😊

Thanks,