As clear a case of over-utilisation as I've seen. The usual advice applies:
The BQM shows a typical over-utilisation pattern, meaning more traffic than VM's local network can handle. Last year many over-utilisation complaints were due to Covid and home working, at this point in time they're primarily down to VM over-selling beyond available capacity. There are efforts to try and stop this happening, they aren't always effective as you can see.
Nothing you can do to improve matters. In some areas VM do indeed undertake work and spend tens of millions each year to increase capacity. But sometimes that's either not possible, or judged uneconomic And sadly VM won't ever admit the truth, so there will be a fault reference and a "fix date", but there's no way of knowing if that fix date is actually backed by an actual plan of action and programme of works. Staff here or on the phone won't know if a fix date is real or not. Quite often it seems not, and as the fix date approaches it is simply moved a month or two ahead. Your options:
1) Sit it out, and hope that VM do carry out improvement works. There's little or nothing you can do to force VM to upgrade the network, nor to be honest about the outlook. That's not the fault of any of the staff you will deal with, it is down to VM's poor management and culture of corporate denial of problems.. And because of this, the problem could be permanently fixed within two weeks if work is already scheduled, it might be six months away, or it may be that the scheme doesn't pass priority and rate-of-return tests and it will never be fixed until sufficient customers cancel.
2) Get yourself a new ISP. If you're in a fixed term contract you'll possibly have to use the VM complaints process (and almost certainly escalate for arbitration at CISAS ) to be released from contract without penalty. If you need to do this, the grounds of your complaint is the poor performance, and your request for release from contract without penalty is twofold: First the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that requires any consumer service to be provided with "reasonable skill and care", and second, the Ofcom Fairness Commitments, that states "Customers’ services work as promised, reliably over time. If things go wrong providers give a prompt response to fix problems and take appropriate action to help their customers, which may include providing compensation where relevant. If providers can’t fix problems with core services they have promised to deliver within a reasonable period, customers can walk away from their contract with no penalty."
Of late VM have in some instances been quite straightforward in agreeing to release customers without early termination charges for those affected by this VM-caused problem. Perhaps the forum staff could explain a way forward through PM with you. Should there be any difficulty then I'm happy to elaborate on beating up VM with their own complaints process and subsequently taking them to the cleaners through escalation to the industry arbitration scheme CISAS, it will be better for all concerned if we don't have to go down that route. Or you may decide that the raw bandwidth is sufficiently useful that you'll wait in hope of a fix, whilst accepting that any information provided on fix dates might as well have "Now wash your hands" printed on it. In that case you should demand a sizeable discount until the problem is fixed. If I was faced with this situation, I'd leave, but only you know what your alternative options are, and what seems the best outcome for you.
