Unreliable broadband for whole street for last two months

[wheresbarney]

Virgin did all-day maintenance on something about two months ago. Since then the whole street has had really unreliable broadband, with service dropping out for a few seconds to a few minutes, as often as every few minutes. 
Sometimes the status page says there is a fault and an engineer is looking at it, but more often it says nothing is wrong.  
Is leaving our only option?

[jbrennand]

For up to date info use the “free & automated” Service Status number - 0800 561 0061 - which usually gives the most up to date info. and tells you of more local issues down to postcode level.

If its affecting multiple users it should be reported there. If you (and they) set up a BQM (below) any issues will be revealed and provide you with the evidence/data you will need to convince VM to let you leave without any early disconnection charges
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If you haven’t already, set up a free, secure and “offlsite” - “Broadband Quality Monitor” to continually monitor the state of your connection and record any true network dropouts , latency issues, packet drops, etc - it will thus allow you to differentiate between those and simple wifi dropouts. It does it 24/7/365 and it keeps a visual record of any/all of your network disconnections, useful data to have to match to the Network logs (in your Hub settings) and also in discussions with VM - note it will take a few hours to start seeing a sensible picture - post up the “link” to the “share live graph”. Click the lower link (Share Live Graph) then click generate. Copy the text in the Direct Link box, beware, there may be more text than you can see. On here click the Link icon (2 links chain to the left of the camera icon) In the URL box paste the link you copied and then click OK

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality

[wheresbarney]

Have had a monitor running for a while. It's not the wifi!

[Hayley_S]

Hello @wheresbarney,

Welcome, thanks for posting.

I am sorry for the issues with your broadband.

Can you please tell me how it is for you today? Did you call the line that was given to you by @jbrennand?

Many thanks,

[wheresbarney]

Haven't called the number, but the online and app service status pages both normally say "no problems". We're definitely still getting the same issues today.

[jbrennand]

Issues may not be listed on the Area Status web page because Areas are not “Geographic” they are billing areas and as that usually only covers faults affecting 1000’s of customers.

The 0800 number should report those affecting a smaller number of customers and may give you more info,

But even that wont cover problems affecting just a few customers.

In which case call it in as a fault (free on 150 VM line - or 0345 454 1111 others - national rate) and see what they say when they test your connection.

[Ashleigh_C]

Hi there @wheresbarney

I have checked your account and I cannot see any outages in your area at the moment. 

Are you still facing issues since your last post? 

Thank you.

[wheresbarney]

Yes, there is an outage right now estimated to be fixed tomorrow afternoon. And there was an outage of several hours yesterday afternoon. And between these complete outages, the service has been pretty unreliable with drops of 1-10 seconds every few minutes.

[Tom_W1]

Hi @wheresbarney, thanks a lot for your message once again.

I'm not sure why we were unable to identify this previously so I'm really sorry, but it would appear that the area congestion issue outage has been extended, and I can see now that the estimated fix time is 15th March at 2022, the reference number for this is F009691706.

I apologise for any inconvenience during this time, but please report back next week when hopefully things have settled down for you.

Many thanks

[Andrew-G]

Customer's BQM doesn't show the classic footprint of a congestion/utilisation fault, so I'm guessing that even if the congestion fault is fixed (which I doubt) then the problem will remain. 

A fulsome apology will be offered if magically resolves next Tuesday; On the basis of my experience I'm sure VM won't mind if I leave the apology in its box and packaging, as I expect I'll need to return it to the shop unused on Wednesday morning.