Virgin Media Community

[Razzy410]

My road has been cabled for a couple of years now, and I see my neighbours with service.

However, when I put my house number in the postcode checker, it says “service not available”. I’m on a not busy residential road.

Phone calls to Virgin Helpline (in The Philippines and India!) were no help, and neither was the chap in the Virgin Store Portsmouth, who came out with a load of twaddle.

I have now discovered that my end of the street (I’m the last on my side with a few other houses) would get service from a different cabinet, on the other side of the small T-junction, which is related to my next door neighbour’s (different) postcode, and some houses on the opposite side of my road with my postcode.

I cannot believe that Virgin could be such dimwits as to not allocate my address to the correct cabinet and thus deny me access to faster broadband earlier.

If you know your neighbours get service but you appear not to, go and check which cabinet your house is connected to. They have a code number on them.

I have now arranged for an engineer to visit in the New Year. I hope that Virgin will give me a good offer too, as I’m going to miss out on their pre-Christmas deals.

If anyone from Virgin Media reads this, please get your act together and inform your workmen to correctly allocate ALL addresses to avoid this problem. It has also cost you two years worth of subscription because I would have taken broadband ages ago. It is my own work that has uncovered this, but the mistake was entirely yours.

[nodrogd]

Cabinets are allocated the way they are as they can only service a fixed number of connections over a pre-defined distance. If there are more houses than can be accommodated on one cabinet you end up on one in an adjacent postcode. This is normal practice & stops cabinets becoming over subscribed.

[Razzy410]

That’s not my point.

When the assistant at the Portsmouth store looked at the “engineers” map, my house, and the other two next to me, were unallocated to any cabinet.

It was by following the tarmac trench that I found I am on another cabinet across the road.

I hadn’t thought of doing that before, and why should have I?

BTW

I have read a lot of posts about very poor customer service, who are rude and dismissive, being fobbed off by call centre staff who don’t know know what they’re talking about, and so on.

What I’d like to know is are the speeds claimed reliable, the connection stable and the hardware of decent quality?

[chenks]

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@Razzy410 wrote:

What I’d like to know is 1) are the speeds claimed reliable, 2) the connection stable and 3) the hardware of decent quality?

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1) depends where you are - network conjestion is often to blame due to being oversubscribed
2) depends where you are - network conjestion is often to blame due to being oversubscribed
3) it's of average quality.

[Roger_Gooner · Accepted solution]

My sympathies are with the OP. The connection to the cabinet is an implementation issue which ought to be invisible to the customer. Good systems design would be to hide the cabinet's location by mapping the customer's post code to the cabinet which serves it. It's distressingly uncommon for this sort of thing to be done, leading to much confusion.

[nodrogd · Accepted solution]

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@Roger_Gooner wrote:

My sympathies are with the OP. The connection to the cabinet is an implementation issue which ought to be invisible to the customer. Good systems design would be to hide the cabinet's location by mapping the customer's post code to the cabinet which serves it. It's distressingly uncommon for this sort of thing to be done, leading to much confusion.

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Sadly a lot of the original cable companies did not keep decent records of their original builds, resulting in inaccuracies & properties being classed as unserviceable when they are, & vice versa. Re-mapping all of these areas would be a very expensive job, as unlike on the OPs estate many pavements will have been re-surfaced since the early 1990s.

[DreamOfCheese · Accepted solution]

Except the post code would not help in this scenario as the OP has said only the last few houses on his side of the street are served by this other cabinet, meaning the rest on his side (so same post code) aren't on the same cabinet.

[Roger_Gooner · Accepted solution]

VM's network does indeed consist of hundreds of rollouts of varying standards and documentation. However when VM knows that a cabinet serves a different post code VM has no system in place to map the post codes in order to provide accurate service availability.

[Razzy410]

Dear All,

Your comments have been helpful.
Clearly the workmen installing the cabinets and digging the trenches “forgot” to allocate me and my two neighbours to the correct one.
The problem has arisen because my postcode is not the same as the cabinet’s.
The rest of my street is served by a different one, and it was by entering a different house number or a different postcode that I discovered that we are all able to get broadband, but that me and my two neighbours were unallocated.

[Razzy410]

BTW.

 I have made 2 morning appointments for an engineer to visit. Wednesday and today (Friday).

I have received no confirmation of said appointments, and have waited in until 1pm.

This does not engender a good opinion of Virgin Media.

What can I do else?