Virgin Media: the saga?

November 19, 2010 in All posts

On about the 6th of November, I signed up to Virgin Media’s 50mb fibre service.

There were five main reasons for this choice:

1. I now point-blank refuse to have anything more to do with BT if I can help it (since they’ve managed to fuck up literally EVERY bill I’ve had since October last year, but that’s another story)
2. The previous occupants of my newly-purchase house had a phone line provided by Sky (I think). Therefore I’d have had to have paid BT the princely sum of £129 to get a connection (see point #1 as to why I’m not doing that)
3. I know people who work for Virgin, and therefore I get a Friends & Family discount rate
4. 50mb fibre is cool

Theses are fairly solid reasons, in my eyes. Except it’s all started to go a bit wrong. Read on to find out more (it’s a bit long, but I say the word ‘fuck’ in it few times, which sort of makes it worthwhile).

I’ve been away for a week since the 11th November, working in London. Before I left, the connection had dropped once or twice – but nothing serious. Since leaving for Londinium, my wife informed me that she’d had to reset the modem every day in order to get the connection working. Not great. One night, it refused to work at all.

I returned yesterday to find the connection sporadic at best. As I’m working from home I need this service, so I called Virgin on 150:

• “Please enter your landline number”: I do so – and the system doesn’t recognise it
• I enter it again; it works
• Navigate through a few layers of IVR until I’m finally put through to someone
• They ask for my landline number & name; I do so – and they can’t find my details. Have to give them my account number for them to find me
• They tell me to ‘Turn it off & on again’: I inform them I’ve done this lots of times, and they book an engineer to come out
• Engineer arrives next day; can’t find any fault – he’s about to leave when the service dropped. He does another test & concludes it’s a faulty modem. Switches it over, and everything works. Hurrah!

…or maybe not. It’s all stopped working again.

So, 150 here I come:

• “Please enter your landline number”: I do so – and the system doesn’t recognise it
• I enter it again; it works

At this stage I hang up, and then try again – in the name of testing it. Sure enough, it fails to recognise me first time round, but then accepts me the second time. In the name of further testing (because I’m a web geek, and this is what I do), I hang up and try again – this time entering my parent’s phone number (who don’t have Virgin): it lets me through first time.

What’s the point in an IVR asking for your phone number if it doesn’t matter what number you give?

So anyway:

• Navigate through a few layers of IVR until I’m finally put through to someone
• They ask for my landline number & name; I do so – and they can’t find my details. Have to give them my account number for them to find me
• They tell me to ‘Turn it off & on again’: I inform them I’ve done this lots of times, and … this time he says “Oh wait, you’ve got 50mb – you’ll need to be put through to the 50mb team”. This didn’t happen last time…
• I’m put through to someone who’s on such a bad line I have to ask them to repeat every other thing they say. This is made 100x times worse because it happens that the Virgin call centre is in India. Eventually, after I’ve turned it all off & on again, they book an engineer to come out for tomorrow.

I’m writing this now as the service seems to have come back to life. I now have to wait until tomorrow to try and explain this weird outage to an engineer who I’m sure will think I’m imagining it.

I’ve also tried logging into the member’s area of the VM site, only to get this:

I then thought I’d check the service status – where it asks me to enter my phone number. Given the fact the IVR and the call-centre can’t find me from my phone number, I don’t hold great hope…and sure enough:

My good friend Martin will no doubt read this story with delight, as he is horrified that I’d choose Virgin as they’ve publically outed themselves as being in favour ditching net neutrality and have been complicit in the investigations and subsequent prosecutions of filesharers (both things I care about).

The way it’s going, I think I’d rather forgo 50mb from a company that shuns net neutrality and go back to 24mb DSL from people who give a crap. I’ll be updating this tomorrow, post engineer arrival.

:: UPDATE :: 21/11

The engineer came, changed the BNC connectors in both the box outside, and the box the cable modem connects to. Everything seems to be working…for now. Stay tuned.

:: UPDATE :: 22/11

It died again this morning. To ensure my sanity, I video’d it to prove I’m not going mad:

:: UPDATE :: 23/11

Died again today. Another rivetting video for proof:

Just to reiterate: I’m not just some sad-sack who sits here waiting for it to stop working – I work from home, and the moment it drops, it stops me in my tracks.

Tags: stupid, virgin media