No broadband for 3 months

[danderham]

I had fibre broadband installed on the 5th September. It's now 3 months later and it has never worked. I live in a corner house and I've been told the installers connected my house to the wrong hub outside, i.e. to the hub on the wrong street. I've had engineers out 3 times and they are unable to do anything as they don't handle that part. Virgin media haven't contacted me once about the issue, I've had to contact them to get updates which results in an engineer coming out and not being able to do anything.

On top of that I've been charged £154. I have to contact them each month to ask for my money back which they have done my giving me credit, but the credit is now going back down so going to have to contact them again.

I'm at the point of giving up and cancelling the whole thing. I believe I should be automatically compensated at a rate of £9.33 a day, which should be around £840 but they won't confirm this.

What do I do?

[goslow]

You should not be charged anything until your service is activated and you can use it. Your 14 day cooling off period should also not begin until such time as you can use the service and evaluate it (which is the point of the cooling off period).

If your service was activated and then failed immediately afterwards then you would have a total loss of service and you would be entitled to compensation at £9.33 per day. Under those circumstances VM would bill you and you would be entitled to the higher rate of compensation until the service is restored.

If your service has never been activated then you have a failed installation/activation and you are entitled to £5.83 per day until your service is activated. VM should not be billing you if your service has not been activated.

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

Are you using the latest type of VM fibre connection XGS-PON? There have been quite a few recent topics on here about failed connections with this new method of connection.

[danderham]

Thanks goslow. It's interesting that they shouldn't be billing me yet, I've had a total of £123 come out of my bank account, which was returned in credit only.

I'm not 100% sure what the connection type is but the engineer did mention something about it being the latest type so it's quite likely to be XGS-PON I guess. The fibre cables were only put into the street about 6 months ago.  The last time an engineer came out was 2 weeks ago, he was the one who told me the issue is due to being connected to the wrong hub/box.

It would be really nice if Virgin Media contacted me to give me an update and to sort out the billing. Me contacting them just results in another pointless engineer visit.

[goslow]

If you have the new XGS-PON service, your issue may be the same as this recent one

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/New-connection-8-days-ago-but-has-never-w...

where the OP decided to cancel and eventually the 'right' person turned up and quickly fixed the problem.

As ever with VM, endless and clueless blundering and bungling along the way due to poor internal communications prevented the issue being resolved in a timely fashion.

You will get a reply from the VM forum team in due course. They may be able to do something to help along similar lines to the topic above.

[danderham]

That mentions you get a yellow light on the router, I don't get any light. When you turn the router off and on a white light comes on for about 30 seconds, then goes out.

From reading that the best option for me sounds like it will be phoning them and cancelling. Will give that a go later today.

[danderham]

So I went through cancellations and they didn't seem interested in resolving anything. So my account will be closed next week and I'll be refunded the money they took out of my bank account. I'll know about the automatic compensation afterwards. Not really the result I wanted but given the terrible service I received I'm kind of glad.

[goslow · Accepted solution]

You should compile a detailed record of events (dates, times of all calls, messages, texts etc. along with any missed appointments and failed appointments where someone turns up but no work was carried out). Keep the record in a timeline format with links from the timeline to each piece of recorded evidence. This will make it easy for you in the future to put forward a case to arbitration for the correct compensation, should that be necessary.

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

Once you have done that, work out what you are owed up to when you cancelled.

In all likelihood, VM will object to paying the compensation with a range of dubious excuses and dodges. In those circumstances you have to log a complaint with VM first of all

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/complaints

(a required first step but not likely to produce any useful outcome) before escalating to arbitration

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

You should also have a look around for fibre roll-outs in your area either from Openreach or the alt-net providers

https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/where-when-building-ultrafast-full-fibre-broadband

https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/ultrafast-full-fibre-broadband

Only VM could install all the infrastructure but fail to connect you as a customer due to administrative and communication bungling.

Good luck with finding an alternative (and better) provider.

[Akua_A]

Hi @danderham 

Welcome to our community forums and thank you for your first posts. 

We truly apologise for this experience of delayed installation on behalf of our team. We can understand the frustration caused and we want to best help. To best discuss your case, I have sent you a private message. Please keep an eye out for an envelope at the top right corner of your Forum page. Let me know if you have any issues locating this. 

Thanks,