Gig1 provision for 52 Mbps up but advertised and in contract at 104 Mbps

[allienet]

Hi, does anyone know how to reach someone at Virgin Media who is able to fix a problem with my new upgrade to Gig1. I have the Hub 5, but I was on the M350 plan as 50 Mbps up wasn't worth the extra money for Gig1. Now that it's (supposed to be) 100 Mbps, I decided it was worth it so upgraded, and got an email yesterday that my upgrade was complete (why this isn't instant is another story, given pushing a new modem config should be highly automatable...).

However, they didn't upgrade me to the _current_ advertised Gig1 plan, but rather to the old one, with 50 Mbps (provisioning is 55000270 bps, or about 52 Mbps) upload. I have power cycled the modem several times, including this morning, in case there was some automation that pushed the correct profile after it was initially incorrectly provisioned, but no luck.

I called their customer service, and after the difficulty of getting through I got to someone who didn't know anything about the one thing Virgin Media sells - DOCSIS cable internet! She tried to blame my speeds on my using modem mode, on it being the day before it was meant to be active on the new plan (nevermind that I had an email plan changes were complete), and finally that "speeds aren't guaranteed."

I fully understand speeds aren't guaranteed, but there's a difference between speeds not being guaranteed and literally provisioning the modem with a cap at half of the advertised speed. She simply did not understand this, or why that's different. Well, it's different because it's false advertising to claim it would ever be possible to reach the stated speed if you cap the modem at half the speed you state 🙂 

So, I'm hoping you, my fellow Virgin Media customers, have any hints or secrets for how to reach someone at Virgin Media who understands that "not guaranteed" does not mean you can provision the modem with the speed capped at half of the "up to" in the contract; and can then get their tech team to provision this correctly 🙂

I've already opened a complaint, but I don't know how long that will take to process - or even if it will just also go to someone who believes that "up to" means it's okay to provision the modem for half the speed sold. Any other routes I should try? Thanks so much if anyone knows of a contact that's been helpful for getting their modem provisioned to allow the speeds advertised for the plan they were sold.

[jbrennand]

All areas are not yet provisioned for 100 up - last I heard "by the end of this year" was the target.

Though you say yours is... - then a VM person needs to comment here when they get here in a day or two.

[Gareth_L]

Hello allienet.

Thank you for letting us know about the upload speed after your upgrade.

Sorry that you have to join our community to seek help.

I'd like to take a look into this for you.
If you don't mind, I will need to send you a private message to pass security. 
If you can check your logo at the  top right of your screen that would be great. 
Regards     
Gareth_L
 

[allienet]

Hi Gareth, thank you - I've replied to this.

@jbrennand - thank you for your help. I'm unsure if my area is included in this or not, but if it isn't, it would be dishonest to sell me a contract stating a maximum possible speed of 104 Mbps if they're provisioning modems in my area to cap at half of that.

[jbrennand]

Might be worth reading all the small print in your contract T&C's.. I would be amazed if their lawyers/Marketing Department havent included a "get out" clause buried somewhere in there to cove delays in upgrading Areas.

[allienet]

@jbrennand - IANAL, so I won't comment on how that would stand up in court. However, at the least I would argue such an ad would be deceptive (of course, in the UK, who knows even about that - the ASA are the same people who concluded it was okay to advertise copper as "fibre" as long as there was fibre in neighbourhood-level network)

[jbrennand]

---

@allienet wrote:

@jbrennand - IANAL

😀

Let us all know if Gareth provides a definitive answer re the upgraded speed provision.

[carl_pearce]

Probably why they state the below on their site:

Gig1 Fibre Broadband

Download Speeds
Advertised Speed: 1130 Mbps
Expected Speed Range: 1073 - 1138 Mbps
Minimum Guaranteed Download Speed: 565 Mbps

Upload Speeds
Advertised Speed: 104 Mbps
Expected Speed Range: 50 - 104 Mbps

[allienet]

I will - it's very disappointing given the 100 Mbps up was by far the main reason I upgraded. I had enough download bandwidth for my needs anyway (about 500 Mbps total - I get about 150 Mbps on my second connection which is 5G from a mobile network - IDK if naming competitors is allowed here, but the one with cheap unlimited 5G but a poor network in many areas - however that only has about 5-10 Mbps up so my routing tables are fairly unbalanced, with that connection only being the primary for some low bandwidth services like messaging apps to offload say, an image attachment in a messaging app, along with one thing - a major network vendor's security product my work uses - that doesn't stay connected reliably on Virgin, though I really should make that connection the primary for my guest VLAN as well 🙂 ). Where I'm really lacking is upstream - backups, video uploads, etc are just an awful experience.

[allienet]

Perhaps carl, but there's a large difference between only getting 50 Mbps at peak times due to congestion or poor routing out of a range, and capping the modem so it can never get over 52 Mbps then advertising that the range is 50-104.