broadband Speed

[Stignasty2]

• I was told by one of your CEO people that you know exactly what speeds people have been getting up to their hub historically (not WiFi speed). If that is the case, why do customers ever have to complain to get an engineer out to fix it? Why are you not proactively fixing these speed problems before the customer notices as some faults affect numbers of customers, not just single customers. If you have that ability, what is the motive behind keeping it under your hat as it doesn't seem very customer focused? Or was the CEO person stringing me a line to fob me off? 

[jem101]

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@Stignasty2 wrote:

• Snip...
• Or was the CEO person stringing me a line to fob me off? 

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Ah well, what do you think?

VM's customer services staff do have a degree of 'form' for doing this; 'we will be monitoring your connection for 24 / 48 hours / 7 days' ; 'a manager will call you back within the next 24 hours', 'this has been escalated to the technical department / critical care team* and they will be in contact with 48 hours'; 'I have boosted your signal, please wait an hour reboot you rub and I absolutely guarantee your issues will be fixed'.

Like to say I am joking or exaggerating - sadly no!

But it did get you off the phone and they chalk up another successfully closed and resolved call - and that's the important thing? No?

*delete as appropriate, or depending on which agent you speak to and which lie they have been instructed to tell customers that day!

[Kath_F]

Hi Stignasty2, 

Thanks for your post and apologies to hear you've been having an issue with your speeds. 

The speeds you get at home will, of course, depend on a variety of factors, it depends on your package, what and how many devices you have, how they are connected amongst other things. We do have monitors in place but it's not possible for us to monitor everyone's service so we do rely on you letting us know if there is an issue. 

Depending on your hub, we have the ability to look at some history and this includes the speed to the hub. 

Checking things this end, I can see you have a third party router connected and you've changed some of the default settings. This does mean some of the checks we have are failing. 

Can you connect your hub directly to a PC/Laptop via an ethernet cable, reboot the hub and then run a speed test? Update your thread here with the speeds you're getting. 

Many thanks, 

[Stignasty2]

Yes, but if you have a wired backbone mesh system with nodes spread throughout the home giving ideal coverage which can be seen by your network tecs. And the devices connected on your LAN, no matter how many, say 50, are producing nothing but occasional handshakes day a few k, then you wouldn't lose 230Mb/s out of the 250 contracted speed, silly to even think that, eh? No matter how variable WiFi can be in nature, I can only see 10 or 20Mb/s lost at the very worst. The accuracy of the speed reading doesn't have to be forensically perfect to know that you are or are not getting the right speed to the home, does it.

[Stignasty2]

And very quickly, your checks and history of received speed to the hub might not necessarily detect a hub not passing the speed through to the home. As in this case, the hub change did stabilise the problem. Did you see that? You would know when the engineer attended, and speed stabilised at midnight on the day of his attendance. The engineer during his attendance, with his kit supplied by VM measured, 150Mb/s just to add spice to the debate. Although not word perfect, I would say in my case that my test method is accurate enough to detect an issue or not, even if not to the Nth degree of accuracy, which in this case seems over kill and predantic.

[Stignasty2]

I have changed settings, correct. I've turned off your WiFi because I have a wired backbone mesh system. It's not in router mode as you described. Not sure why turning WiFi off affects your testing ability? That seems very odd?

[Stignasty2]

And your history comes from the hub? So you don't have history of any issues for when the fault was occuring then? Interesting.

[jpeg1]

If your Hub is in modem mode and your own router connected, they can't get past it to see what you are using. That's basic network security.  And the Hub doesn't have a history function other that the connection log which you can see for yourself. 

[Stignasty2]

• Kath F

 luckily as they seem to have gone missing. Very informative they are too. Thank you

[Stignasty2]

The hub not in modem mode, their WiFi is switched off. I have a mesh system not being used in router mode. They insinuated I called them for nothing re: slow speeds. Kath confirmed my suspicions that my old hub couldn't log speed received and the lady from the executive team was being very vague about where they could test to to get their results. An engineer attended very late past the appointment time and changed the hub to a hub4. The engineer tested less than half the contracted speed during that attendance. But from midnight that night I was receiving the correct speed and that confirmed that my test before and after the engineer visit was the correct test, as I have seen the contracted speed ever since. So a Hub fault?. The main problem is is the bullying technique of the executive team lady who to be honest had not one idea what she was talking about and was full of unreasonable accusations.