After placing my order with VM, they have just informed me that they cannot provide fibre Bb and TV services to my house.
My house has had VM fibre services previously. There is a VM duct under the footpath 5m from my back door, and the old fibre tail still enters the garden even though it has at some point been severed, no longer enters the house itself, and has been tested by a VM engineer as no longer functioning. My neighbours - the other half of our semidetached property - still has VM fibre services provided.
The problem lies with our address, and with VM's failure to update its database to take into account changes in address and postcodes. The previous owners of our house sold off the bottom half of the land, and 2 new houses have been built on that half. This has meant that our house has had to have a new address, as it no longer has access to the road at the bottom of the plot so the new address refers to the road at the top of the plot and has a slightly different postcode. The road with the only access to our property is, however, the road alongside which VM's duct and fibres runs, and is where the previous VM service to the property was provided from.
When I applied for VM services online (some 6 months after the change of address was approved by the Council), VM's service checker said it couldn't provide services to our new postcode; presumably VM's database had not yet been updated. I was therefore forced to quote the property's old address in order to start the process. Contract was agreed, and an Engineer came to the house and, once he'd called me and been directed to the current entrance at the top of the house, he found and tested the old fibre. After this, he said a new fibre would need to be pulled to us from the nearest cabinet, but said this wouldn't be a problem.
After a few weeks, I started getting emails and texts from VM apologising that they had to delay our installation date because Council approval was required for the sub-contractor works required to provide service to our house. This sounded odd, so I called VM's Pre-Installation Team, who informed me that they needed to dig across some new tarmac to provide access to our new-build property, and that this work have been assigned to their contractors. It transpired that VM was planning to provide services to one of the two new houses on the land at the bottom of where our 100-year-old house sits. I explained this, referred them to the original Engineer's visit, and asked them to re-plan to provide to our actual house, not one of the (still empty) new ones.
More weeks passed, and I started getting more emails saying similar things to before. I asked for more Engineer visits so I could once again explain face-to-face, but they kept sending them to the wrong house and not getting them to call me against my explicit instructions (I waited in for 2 half-day appointments and one all-day appointment, none of which were fulfilled or generated calls from their Engineers to ask where we were).
I finally had an email today saying that VM had cancelled my order as they could not provide services to my area. I called them and discussed this at length, and Virgin finally admitted that they had provided services to my house previously, but said they could no longer do so and didn't know when they might be able to in future.
So the question is, why is this, when there is a VM duct just outside my house, VM has provided to this house previously, and they are still provided services to my immediate neighbour?
Any assistance or even better intervention would be greatly appreciated.
