No service for 6 days and counting, multiple false reports of broadband issues fixed

[Christo1k]

Hi all, never normally am one to complain on a message board but the service from Virgin has been so atrocious it's driven me to this. 

On Tuesday 2 October at around 12pm we lost broadband service. The service checker at first said there were no issues in our area, so we went through all of the regular cable checks, guides, resetting the hub etc but it did not work. I called in to Virgin and then they said to wait 24 hours for things to be resolved. Later in the day however the service checker updates to say it was an area issue and it would be resolved by Wednesday 3 October at 16;25. 

That time passed, and then it was updated to being resolved by Thursday 5 October at 8.25.

That time passed, then it was updated to being resolved by Tuesday 10 October at 12.25 (a ridiculous amount of time but we were fine as long as there was an update with a resolution time.)

Ever since then, Virgin have on 3 separate occasions given an upate saying that the issue has been resolved. Each time we test our hub and it doesn't connect correctly (we have maybe 1 minute of poor connection before the hub goes into a reset loop). Each time within the next few hours the service checker then reverts to saying there are "issues affecting the services in our area". As a result I have spent at least 4 hours on the phone to 4 separate support agents in these windows where they say things have been resolved to book technicians, only for them to be cancelled once they determine they haven't actually fixed the problem and update their service checker. We've had three technician appointments cancelled by this point, making rearranging of work and schedules completely pointless.

I have two questions: 

1. Is it standard for Virgin to say an issue is resolved when it clearly has not been this many times in a row? I am fine with an extended wait time but what is intolerable is continuously lieing to your customers saying service has been restored when there are still issues.

2. We should 100% be entitled to full compensation from the date we reported our loss of service (i.e. Tuesday 2 October) until now when we have not been able to use broadband services in any basic capacity since then (not even for email and web browsing). However, I am concerned that Virgin will claim that the issue was resolved on the many occasions they reported it so and that these are "separate faults" and will try to strip us of our rightful compensation. How do we go about ensuring we are fairly remunerated for our service loss? 

We are based in N22 in London if that is of any help.

Any support and advice would be much appreciated. 

[Steven_L]

Hey Christo1k,

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 can see on the system that there is an area issue and that is due to be resolved today at 4pm, please let us know, if you have any issues after this time. 

1. Is it standard for Virgin to say an issue is resolved when it clearly has not been this many times in a row? I am fine with an extended wait time but what is intolerable is continuously lieing to your customers saying service has been restored when there are still issues.

Any times that we supply are estimated fix times and therefore subject to change but if we are saying an issue has been resolved then it should have been resolved.

Would you like to raise a complaint about the issues that you've experienced, you can do that via the methods here or I can raise a complaint for you from here but would need to pass account security to be able to do that, the choice is up to you on how you'd like to raise a complaint, if you wish to raise this.

2. We should 100% be entitled to full compensation from the date we reported our loss of service (i.e. Tuesday 2 October) until now when we have not been able to use broadband services in any basic capacity since then (not even for email and web browsing). However, I am concerned that Virgin will claim that the issue was resolved on the many occasions they reported it so and that these are "separate faults" and will try to strip us of our rightful compensation. How do we go about ensuring we are fairly remunerated for our service loss? 

You will be entitled to automatic compensation in the amount of £9.33 per day for a total loss of service after 2 full working days from registering the loss of service to us  you can find more in-depth information about this here.

I hope that we can have your area issues resolved before the estimated fix time of today, please keep us updated and let me know, if you wish me to raise a complaint for you.

Kind Regards,

Steven_L

[Alex75]

 Hi Christo1k i can confirm 100% what you write. I'm in area N22 and i have exactly the same experience. I think they will do everything to not pay the compensation because if you go to the page of the service checker the first thing you see is "no issues in your area". Now is 10 days without broadband and no more updates from VM

[Alex75]

Steven_L, i have rise 2 complaints but when i go to track my complaints on VM page what i see is "

There's nothing to see here

We've not got any on-going issues connected with your account, so there's nothing to see here."

Can you expline this?

[Christo1k]

Hello Steven_L

The issue has been resolved now, this happened on Friday 13th October at 10am when the 4th technician that we booked was finally allowed to come to our premises. He provided us with a Hub 5 and this seemed to resolve the issue after received another update from Virgin that stated that the problem in the N22 area had been fixed. 

If this was an issue with our router, then I wonder why we had our technician was cancelled three times when we tried to get this issue resolved. Had they been permitted to attend it may have been resolved sooner.

I expect to be reimbursed for compensation from two days after we registered our initial loss of service on Tuesday 3rd October at 18:30, to the time when the engineer resolved this, Friday 13th October at 10am.

This means 9 full days of no service in total and as such 7 full days compensation - 7 * £9.33 = £65.31. If an amount any less than this is provided back to us by Virgin I will be raising the issue with the communications ombudsman. Please confirm that this will be reimbursed to us.

[Christo1k]

Hello Alex75, not sure if you're still in limbo but as stated above our issue was resolved by finally getting Virgin to send out a technician and replace the router. Hope this helps in your situation too. 

[Megan_L]

Hi Christo1k,

Thanks for coming back to us with a full breakdown of what has happened and what you feel needs to be done next in order to fully resolve your complaint as a whole. 

I am really sorry that you've had such a poor journey since the first fault occurrence happened on 3rd October. 

We can send off a Compensation Review to the Team who will take a look into this for us, before we do this we'll need to pop into a PM so we can collect some information first 🤗

Speak to you soon!

Thanks,

Megan_L