Is the warpath the only option?

[Anthony01]

Complaint submitted in February, no updates or contact in relation to it since start of April.

Ongoing issues, when queried over the phone, are explained with the same information on your service checker web page (thanks, I guess).

Last attempt to get information on what’s causing the intermittent issues was explained away as “upgrading your area” - where is the planned outage notice? How long is the work expected to last?

Why is there an expectation that I will just suck it up and put up with regular extended periods with no service (in the middle of my god damn work day too!)?

Can someone explain how a communication company can be so incomprehensibly terrible at communicating?

Do I really have to escalate to the ADR to be treated fairly here?

[goslow]

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@Anthony01 wrote:

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Do I really have to escalate to the ADR to be treated fairly here?

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Yes, it is very likely that you will have to do that. If 8 weeks have passed since you first complained to VM you can escalate to the ombudsman without delay.

But what is the outcome you want from VM? A substantive fix to the issues or are you wanting to ditch VM with no early disconnection fees and move somewhere else?

The ombudsman can't compel VM to fix the issues but may agree you should be able to leave with no EDF or may offer you compensation of some kind.

FWIW, I had problems with VM in the distant past where they were upgrading the infrastructure in my area for increased speed an capacity. The issues I had were down to over utilisation which made the connection so slow as to become unusable. The total time that took to resolve was about 15 months IIRC. I negotiated a rolling credit with VM while the fault was in place but I had to get it applied each month as long as the fault number was still active.

[Anthony01]

I just want the service I pay for to work, clearer comms on outages and a discussion about compensation to happen.

In the meantime I am happy to barrage them with phone calls and cost them an ombudsman case - I guess they don’t really care about the financial cost of that either.

[goslow]

You will get a reply from the VM forum team here, usually within a few days. They might possibly give you more information on the fault issue but, if it is some large-scale problem that is dragging on for a long time, don't get your hopes up for any kind of fix any time soon. VM will just let it run on to VM's own timetable.

If you are going to stick with VM, then you could request some kind of rolling credit be applied which might allow you to buy in some kind of backup connection such as a mobile data SIM on a rolling monthly basis to cope with the outages

The automatic compensation scheme

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/billing-and-payments/automatic-compensation

only deals with a total loss of service and the two working day fix time which VM is allowed probably means it will not kick in for your situation

It is also quite likely that VM will decline to give you anything at all, in which case you would need to progress to the ombudsman with a complaint about failure to provide an acceptable level of service and a request for compensation. If you have already waited 8 weeks since you first complained to VM you should be able to do that immediately if you need to following this process

https://www.commsombudsman.org/our-process

If you are not already doing so, you could set up a BQM to track the outages which should give you some evidence of the scale and frequency of the problem when you make your complaint to the ombudsman

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

[John_GS]

Hi @Anthony01 

Thanks for posting and welcome to the community.

Sorry to hear you're affected by an ongoing fault. I'll send you a PM now to assist further.