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Issues with Broadband since April 2019

kmuroga
Tuning in

I have had intermittent broadband service since April 2019. It has affected my entire block of flats. After approximately 20 engineer visits (not including those to other residents), it was deemed that the cable from your main junction to our block of flats had become damaged.  I emailed Lutz Schuler's Executive Team in September 2019 to escalate and received a reasonably quick response that the issue would be fixed. Also was provided some loyalty credits that have since run out. To date nothing has been done and today an engineer came by to say that our block will be deemed unserviceable. He said his manager has repeatedly escalated upwards with no response. Either Virgin Media does not want to place a new cable via a different route or has not bothered to litigate the construction company that damaged the original cable. 

My TV works fine and many of my email addresses in use are with Virgin Media. What are my options and how can this be escalated? 

Kenji Muroga

7 REPLIES 7

Andrew-G
Alessandro Volta

In essence, your options are pretty limited.  If the staff here can make enquiries, you may find that the problem is simply down to VM's often extremely poor internal communications, rather than any real intention to disconnect multiple customers.  And maybe given a boot to the corporate posterior things might start to move, although even then expect slow progress measured in months. That's the best case.

Worst case, Virgin Media have no service obligation, so can withdraw services if they see fit; The telecoms regulator Ofcom does not deal with individual complaints, and is weak, slow and wholly ineffectual in holding companies to the "fairness code" that it persuaded them to agree to.  The Communications Consumer Panel that is supposed to act as consumer advocate in telecoms is so embarrassingly weak that the government are consulting on replacing it altogether - a typical overpaid and underworked quango.  The industry complaints scheme CISAS works well, but isn't quick and can't force VM to undertake specific works.  Your contract with VM stipulates nothing about reliability, continuity or any form of service commitment, so you can't take them to task for that.  You could use the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that requires any service to be provided with reasonable skill and care, but that's not the same as being required to continue to provide it.  In that case you're presumably looking at Openreach ISPs (and formal complaint + escalation to CISAS to get compensation for the shockingly poor performance of VM in resolving a simple cable faulty.

Hi @kmuroga,

 

Welcome back to our community forums.

 

Sorry to hear about your ongoing ordeal with your local cabling. We can understand the inconvenience and frustration this may have caused.

 

I am unable to locate your account via forum details. Was the great advice given by @Andrew-G helpful? Also when last were you in contact with our team regarding this? What was discussed?

 

Please get back to me when you can.

 

Thanks,

Akua_A
Forum Team

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Akua_A,

Can email me separately and I can give you further details.  While it was nice of Andrew-G to respond with advice, this issue really must be sorted out by Virgin Media.

 

Regards

japitts
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@kmuroga wrote:

many of my email addresses in use are with Virgin Media.


Just on this specific point, relying on any ISP-supplied email is - IMO - a bad move in the long-term.

If you want a simple solution, then just create an account with one of the web-based providers like gmail, outlook, hotmail or similar.

If you're willing to spend a small amount, then owning your own internet domain is a good way - you can either store your email with your domain host, or just "copy & forward" incoming email to whichever mailbox you want to use. But quote your domain address to the outside world.

Either way, relying on email that is provided by your ISP is a situation you want to get out of.

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more

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Thank you for getting back to me @kmuroga.

 

I am unable to email you however are you happy to remain speaking here on the forums. Also when last were you in contact with our team regarding this? What was discussed? 

 

This will help us to understand what is going on so we can best assist.

 

Thanks,

Akua_A
Forum Team

New around here? Check out the do's and don'ts, in our Community FAQs


I received a Complaint reference: C-0907211435 on 9 July with the standard 28 day response after I was able to locate Lutz Schuler's email address and send him/his Exec Team another email that I sent the same day. Let me know if you can access this Complaint.

The last person I discussed this was a field engineer (probably my 24th visit) on 9 July. He told me that the damaged cable issue has been raised multiple times upward and that there has been no activity or appetite to fix it.  There are 17 or 18 flats in the building so number of complaints and engineer visits have been so great that the engineer said our building would be deemed unserviceable.

Regards

As a point of reference, I have built up Virgin email addresses since 1998, not expecting them to deem us unserviceable. I have gmail, yahoo, etc addresses but the sheer pain of converting over them is something I'd rather avoid.