April 11, 2012

Bloody Virgin Broadband

I posted last week about how unreliable my VIP 50Mb broadband has been for over a month, down almost every day at some point. We had an engineer out last week who said he bumped up the signal from the street cabinet and sure enough full service was resumed. Temporarily. Now it's been down for the best part of a day and I can't get through to the Service Desk.
Is anyone else getting this? TV and phone are fine, but obviously TiVo is little more than a V+ without the internet so I'm well peeved, and my daughter's exam revision is being hit big time by no internet. Is this the price we're to pay for the speed doubling promised? Give me a stable service any day over a speed hike I don't need.
UPDATE: April 18. I've now had continuous broadband for 72 hours, albeit at speeds around the 30mb rather than the previous 47mb+. Thanks to Alex at VM for the offer to resolve this for me. Hopefully I haven't tempted fate by suggesting the service is now sorted :-)
UPDATE 2: Turns out I spoke to soon, but now they've been back again and I'm seeing the speeds I used to get, hopefully now with a stable service

16 comments:

BK said...

tell them to give you free mobile broadband in compensation... should at least get you online.

Soulbroth3r said...

How did you manage to post this without functional internet?

Reza said...

I also too have significant loss of quality and reliability of Internet. I've gone through several long conversation and suggestion but no luck.

It was okay for a while but down again last night. Mostly is very poor quality (long ping delays, using http://pingtest.net/)

Nialli said...

@Soulbroth3r: I posted from work. (I can also blog post from my mobile btw)

Nialli said...

Right, my daughter reports we have internet again, which proves it's something external to my house that's giving us the unreliability. Does anyone know if it's likely to be cabinet or head end?
Incidentally, without internet the TiVo services don't entirely vanish: you can play back recordings no problem and it still records fine, but you can't access On Demand or Search.

All Grain Brewer said...

We had lots of problems recently with umpteen broadband dropouts a day and hardly any VOD. We only have 10meg BB but my wife uses it for her work and it was getting bl**dy annoying. Called the engineers in and they said they where surprised we could get ANY TV as the signal was so low. I'll give the Cable Engineers credit, they pinged the problem as being the cable which had been laid across the flat roofs of the council property had 'decayed' because of being exposed to the sun and the heat from the felt roof. They where here 5 hours and completely replaced the cable and we are now up-and-running at our full speed again. I complained about loss of service to VM and they reduced my bill this month by £40. So it's a Bouquet for VM in this instance.

Nialli said...

In my experience there seem to be some real quality VM engineers but a few who just seem to bodge and run. I'm sure VM could reduce the number of problems and call outs by ensuring a better job in the first instance and firing the bodgers.

andyduff85 said...

My 50mb broadband has been very dodgy since the end of last week. Speed tests show my connection is all over the place, nowhere near the 50mb I pay for. Up until recently it was always rock solid. Streaming online is a pain!

MartyC said...

My TV and broadband went down for half a day on Tuesday. Phoned at 7.30 am to report it, but automated service said to phone after 8 am. Got through to Indian call centre where was told would be fixed on Thursday! Asked if maybe there was an area fault but was told there was no fault in the area. Not happy So how to get through to UK - redial and select thinking of leaving Virgin option - straight through to UK, and put through to technical dept who again said there was no problem in the area. I told them the problem was not between any of our family laptops and the Virgin router as I had local connection between laptops, just no internet access from the router. But they insisted no local area problems existed. They booked an engineer for Friday - so I would be without TV or internet for 3 - 4 days! I accepted the booking but told them I wasn't happy and would be considering my options as my contract ends in May. Five minutes later my husband came in to say Virgin had phoned his mobile to say there was a fault in the area and it would be fixed shortly - lo and behold everything back on within 20 minutes - was about 10 am by this time. However agree that my fibre optic internet connection is not always reliable - goes down at least once or twice a week.

MartyC said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Try changing the wireless channell the router puts out your signal on from the router settings in Vm

MartyC said...

Thanks to Grant. I'll try that.

Craig said...

I have 100meg broadband but only getting speeds of between 30 / 50 depending on time of day. Had engineer out who said no problems as far as he could see I was getting about 90meg. Didn't believe him as speed checks where still coming out at between 30 / 50. Spoke to call centre who said problem lies with my pc and not them.? Anyone else had this response.

kenny said...

Yes graig I'm a VIP 50 and I'm only getting 20 mbs and they blamed it on my laptop saying using wifi can reduce my speed,but my ps3 is wired and I still only get 23mbs I'm not even getting half of what I'm paying for very strange indeed...

SASLord said...

I get more than 100% of the speed I pay for 10mb and I have had only about 2 short (3min) periods of downtime in several years.

Nialli said...

One thing I've learned after my recent problems is that those broadband speed test sites can give inconsistent results depending on which server you select. For example, I live in SE London, but if I use either of the London Speedtest.net servers I get lower download speeds reported than if I use Ashford or Maidenhead or even Brussels. ThinkBroadband is possibly a little more consistent.