Broken broadband cable - 3 week wait for repair?!

[jnh22]

Hello,

Three days ago I reported a broken cable on the grass verge outside my property which has cut my internet off.  After contacting VM customer service for three days in a row the best they can do is get an engineer to take a look in almost 3 weeks time (1st appointment given was 5th Sept, now it's 1st Sept).

Can this be normal?!  My wife works from home and needs internet and we have online antenatal classes to attend, amongst other things.

I've made VM support aware that I'm therefore entitled to an automatic £8.40 per day in compensation while the service is off, which they seemed vague about agreeing with and said I'd have to call back later for some reason.

FYI - the cable was broken after the (very shallowly buried) cable was chewed on by an animal after being left slightly exposed to the open during a driveway installation.

[Chris_W1]

Hi Jnh22, thanks for the message and welcome to the forums. I am sorry to hear that the cable has been damaged and this would require replacing. We will aim to get this resolved as soon as possible and if you are due compensation this would be applied once the service is fixed. This would require a two man crew. ^Chris. 

[jnh22]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. I decided I couldn't wait for my Virgin appointment so I got it fixed.

FYI - It took 1 person just 3 minutes to splice the cable and be on his way - I'll never fail to be amazed by the inefficiencies of businesses such as Virgin Media.

I will just switch to another provider after my contract runs out (and VM try to hike my price up again).

[Robert_P]

Although we are pleased to hear this has now been resolved we would never recommend independent engineers working on our cabling and equipment we understand the urgency for getting this repaired. When arranging appointments we also offer the earliest time available that is convenient for our customers, sorry if the appointment offered was later than we would have liked.

Rob

[jnh22 · Accepted solution]

Thanks Rob,

It was actually done by a Virgin Media engineer who was working in the neighbourhood, he was happy to do it.

My advice to anyone being told to wait weeks, or days, for their cable repair - just keep a look out for a Virgin Media van working locally and kindly ask the engineer if they can spend 3 minutes spicing your cable back to health.

[Adri_G]

Thanks for replying back and for explaining this, jnh22.

We're glad to hear you had the luck to find one of our staff in the neighbourhood that helped out with this cable issue.

We'd always need to schedule an appointment for these cases so we ensure one of our trained staff will attend as we need to adhere to health and safety rules as well. 
Sorry to see this was a late one we booked for you, these are subject to staff and time availability.

Our engineer was there for another job, however it was to their discretion whether they could help out and we're glad to see they took a moment to fix this 🙂
Please, make sure any appointments scheduled for you are cancelled here as we no longer need to attend.

Let us know if you have more questions or concerns in regard to the above, happy to assist.