Broadband fault - virgin - and Ofcom

[mikeprice]

Hi all

 

looking for some information about computers, broadband and networky stuff at home - thought there may be someone on here that could help:rolleyes:

 

Just had a nice friendly discussion with Virgin about our broadband speed - I thought 3M was a bit on the slow side as we pay for 100M

 

Anyway - after going through their helpful fault fixing on line system - which, to my amazement, made no difference at all - I rang them as there is not way of actually saying you have a problem without doing this

I was only waiting for 25 minutes to get an answer (Note - I used to work on the systems for a major call centre - the phones HAD to be answered within 5 rings at the time!!!!)

 

Anyway - went through all the normal carp - tested over wireless (5GHz - which he interpreted as 5G mobile so we had to talk about that) and wired - funnily enough that made no difference - as always

Reset the box - and restarted it twice - once after he 'sent a renew signal to the hub'

speed has increased to 30M at times - but still slow

 

 

ANYWAY - to the point

 

He said that he has 'done he can from their end' so he is going to refer it as a complaint to OFCOM

Whut??

 

not heard of that before but he was very insistent that the minimum that I should ever see is 54M - and as it is below that then OFCOM will investigate and ........

 

Has anyone else heard of this??

was he talking ********??

was he just plain lying - I have had absolute lies from Virgin earlier this year - they seem to have a series of problems and get desperate at times??

 

any ideas??

[mikeprice]

Further info

 

tested the speed - through 3 different sites - several times since the phone call to virgin - consistent around 30-40 M

 

Just typed in the above moan etc

 

just tested again - just over 100M

 

weird - makes me wonder if someone actually did something from Virgin???

[Passat1983ICTech]

hi there i think your on a ring network round your area ware you live i am the same but now it runs fine

 

what VM do is sell more contracts what they can hand ull i been lookiing in to this my self if this happen look up virgin media community sign up is so much easier to talk to some on her they can look in to this if you have any problems

just keep a eye on this from time to time hope this helps

[hardtailstar]

Virgin have been having issues over the past couple of days across the UK.

 

My internet was a snail but today its back up to Usain Bolt speeds.

[MatthewL]

I have so many issues with them, I rang to get my contract re done the other week and halved my bill instantly, was having issues they pushed some settings down to my modem and it reset it made a bit of difference but I have to reset every few days but this week I have noticed lots of drops.

 

I have no other choice for internet as the BT offerings as shocking where I am. Ring up and threaten to leave, get an engineer out, may need your modem replacing.

[Davit2005]

He said that he has 'done he can from their end' so he is going to refer it as a complaint to OFCOM

Whut??

 

not heard of that before but he was very insistent that the minimum that I should ever see is 54M - and as it is below that then OFCOM will investigate and ........

 

Has anyone else heard of this??

was he talking ********??

was he just plain lying - I have had absolute lies from Virgin earlier this year - they seem to have a series of problems and get desperate at times??

 

any ideas??

 

I cannot believe they would rather talk to Ofcom as a complaint than send an engineer to further investigate, what are they playing at.

 

Suggest you ring back and hopefully get someone else, get it confirmed in an email or Chat window, insist on talking to the Supervisor and threaten to take it to OfCom yourself but take it to OfCom anyway, seems like and a stalling tactic to me.

 

I was with Cable & Wireless, then NTL then Virgin, when Virgin took over it immediately went down hill. I went to TalkTalk then back to VM for another try which quickly went south (made worse by engineer who witnessed problem with VM box and then lied). Now on BT with a Business package, had one outage with BT in 3 years and that was confirmed as a physical cable issue outside of property boundary.

 

BT certainly are not perfect though from what I have experienced but overall better than VM in my experience. Many of our staff are on VM and they have been hit with so many outages in the few last months.

Edited August 28, 2020 by Davit2005

[mikeprice]

TBF to Virgin they have been brilliant over the last 5 or more years

 

It is only recently that they seem to have gone downhill

 

don't even mention BT to me - last time I dealt with them it took them over 3 months to admit my house existed (literally - they claimed that my house didn't exists - they were fine with numbers 1,3,4,5,6 etc etc but believed that 2 didn't exist!!)

when there was a BT box nailed to the outside wall that they had installed a few weeks before - it was a new house and BT set up all the stuff before they were sold.

Only managed to get them to connect it when the builders brought it up through their contact that arranged the installation!!

when the engineer actually finally turned up he said it was already done - it just needed a 1 minute activation remotely

 

You know then kids and/or parents ask the IT tech at school about their IT problems - the vast majority over the last 10 years have been BT

obviously when I started in schools it was AOL - but that was another story

[NokiX]

Virgin is literally a hit or miss provider, I've had a good experience with them in one place yet in another village the speed was awful with terrible latency. That turned out to be because they had over subscribed the area and told me to phone every month to receive a discount on my bill until they fixed the issue which they advised would be a year later....

 

Needless to say we ended up switching to BT for a while just to get away from those problems and whilst the speed was lower it was consistent and we never had latency issues. As others have said as well, Virgin have had a number of problems recent as well, a few of my colleagues have had routing issues with Virgin this month but at least for the last couple of weeks it has stablised.

 

From what you've described though you seem to be stuck choosing between two not ideal providers! I personally use Zen currently which has treated me very well over the last few years but it is of course using the open reach network. There's always the 4G option, another colleague of mine uses a 4G connection as his primary connection as it's actually faster than his DSL connection but if it's worth anything a friend of mine also had a similar experience with Virgin support fobbing the situation off as they couldn't be bothered to deal with it!

[MatthewL]

I need to ring Virgin next week if my connection doesn't improve, a reboot before any major Teams call is a must at the minute.

 

I had considered the 4G option, I access stuff remotely so need to be able to connect in, have to weight it up, at the minute I make do. When the BT offerings change I'm going to move to FTTC or P if its available!!

[mikeprice]

OK - speed tests have consistently shown over 100M for the last few hours

 

magically starting half an hour or so after I called them

 

so - I have a theory

 

Whatever the person I spoke to meant by referring it to OFCOM - it was founded in something real

 

and he followed it through

 

but as it was directed to OFCOM it got the attention of someone higher up

 

who then investigated and someone fixed something

 

at which point my speed suddenly improved

 

As I say - it is only a theory - based on a single fact and a dogy timeline

but it is still a possibility

[Andrew_C]

Recent issue with Virgin, they claimed a fix applied, better for a bit, then started dropping out again. Only briefly, but irritating.

 

Next call - "OK, clearly a problem; you'll get a new router, should be with you tomorrow".

 

Yup, back up to 100M and rock solid.

[Davit2005]

TBF to Virgin they have been brilliant over the last 5 or more years

 

It is only recently that they seem to have gone downhill

 

don't even mention BT to me - last time I dealt with them it took them over 3 months to admit my house existed (literally - they claimed that my house didn't exists - they were fine with numbers 1,3,4,5,6 etc etc but believed that 2 didn't exist!!)

when there was a BT box nailed to the outside wall that they had installed a few weeks before - it was a new house and BT set up all the stuff before they were sold.

Only managed to get them to connect it when the builders brought it up through their contact that arranged the installation!!

when the engineer actually finally turned up he said it was already done - it just needed a 1 minute activation remotely

 

You know then kids and/or parents ask the IT tech at school about their IT problems - the vast majority over the last 10 years have been BT

obviously when I started in schools it was AOL - but that was another story

 

Yes I've had my share with BT believe me but all with business customers none with personal users, strange that, lol.