@Cesco wrote:
It is the same situation as mine. There is a solution, actually, and also very simple: for them to drill the street, and remove the blockage. If they say no, it's no - and this "no" is visible on the postcode checker on their website. However, if they say they will cable your property, they will have to. I totally understand that they will try to "hide" their responsabilities by giving false promises and reassurances, in the meantime I would advise you to search for an alternative solution, but stick to them as once you do a contract, it's a contract and they are legally bound to respect it, unless you step back. I am really deluded from how low consideration they have towards customers and towards their own contracts and policies.
Unfortunately for you Virgin Media don't have to connect anybody. Virgin Media are a commercial business in a largely de-regulated market, and whilst BT and Openreach have such things, Virgin Media have no statutory universal service obligation, and if for any reason at all VM decide they don't want to connect a customer (even after accepting an order) then they are free to do so. They can be liable for some limited compensation for delays between contractually agreeing to connect a customer and then cancelling, but (in the instance of a company initiated cancellation) that's all, and the regulations do allow for the circumstance where a company cancels an order that it has accepted. You would be at liberty to take VM to court asserting that they are in breach of contract, but you'd need to be pretty confident that you've carefully read all relevant VM terms and conditions and there's nothing about company cancellations. You'd then you'd need to successfully assert in court that this was a breach of contract, and claim what was a reasonable settlement. For a service charged at between £25-125 a month to residential customers, I doubt that even if you win you'd do much better than the Ofcom compensation scheme rules.
In the case of a simple blockage, VM will generally work to clear it. But there's a fixed budget for new connections, if it will cost more than that then the company won't connect you because they'll lose money.
