Upgrade Disaster

DarthMuppet · 17-10-2007, 13:05

I should say up front that I am in general a VM fan. I've been with them (and NTL and Cambridge Cable) since 1993 ish i think, and I have had excellent service and support. Until now.

I decided to upgrade to XL, from just phone and 4MB BB. The engineer installed the TV box and left, all was fine. I was connected to one of my home PCs from my office, and at about 1530, the connection dropped and didn’t come back. I got home and it was still down. I called Broadband Tech Support, and they told me that Virgin had accidentally disconnected me, and I had to ring Customer Services to have it put back. I rang CS, and was told that yes, it had been disconnected by mistake, and it would take 24 hours to put it back.

24 hours later, I have no broadband. I call CS, they say I have to call BBTS, as everything looks OK. I call BBTS again, they say they can see the problem with my account, and customer services are the only ones who can fix it. They also said that if CS say they can’t do it, to get CS to call BBTS and they will tell them what to do. I call CS, they say they can’t fix it and refuse to call BBTS. I now have broadband that NOBODY can fix. I call CS again, and the lady I spoke to says yes, she can see the problem, she fills in a reconnection form and it will be 24-48 hours. Fine, I fume, so be it.

48 hours later, I have no broadband. I call BBTS, they say phone CS. I phone CS, I speak to Debbie, who explains things in a bit more detail, one notable thing being that CS are not physically able to contact BBTS. I don’t like what I hear, so I speak to her supervisor (this was on 15th October). I am now told that the reconnection takes 10 days and there is no way of making it happen faster. It took 6 days to finally get to this point. Fortunately, the 10 day period did actually begin on the first day I called, as the CS analyst did the right thing. I am to expect reconnection on 20th.

I have just checked my email this morning, and I discover that my mail account has been disabled / removed. I even get a non-delivery report when I send email to it. The consequence of this is that both my wife and I are likely to a) lose all the email in our mailboxes, and b) be automatically unsubscribed from distribution lists we subscribe to.

So. I upgrade, i lose service for 10 days, and lose all my email too. Ho Hum. The issue is fixing their own cock-ups - 10 days is ridiculous. I was disconnected with a single mouse-click, so it should take no more to put it back.

I will be sending this, with some other (sensible) suggestions to 'Customer Concern' to see if anyone cares, as this is utter madness.

DM

**Rob** · 17-10-2007, 14:34

to Cable Forum

It does seem rather daft that you can be disconnected so easily and yet nobody can reactivate the account. If it is that difficult to reactivate, then surely safeguards should be in place to prevent accidental deletion.

What seems even worse is that nobody in tech support or customer services was able to give you a straight answer, for a few days. Even now the 10 days, to me sounds like a bit of a fob off. At least that's the attitude I'd be taking with VM.

The outcome of your complaint would be interesting - that's if anyone at VM reads it

smeagoly1 · 17-10-2007, 15:20

This is diabolical two sections in the same firm not being able to talk direct to each other!
Your deffo been given the run around, next time demand your put through to a line manager as VM surely are in breach of their own contract with a paying customer. Or at the very least demand some sort of compen, for the shabby treatment your getting.

10 days to reconnect??? that's just a joke and a half. Someone at VM has dropped the ball and not willign to fess up to a misstake.

I used to recommend the service I used to get to all and sundry,When it was Telewest/Blueyonder, but since VM took over I'm warning them to avoid for now regarding BB.

VM are great and brokering a deal regarding whole packages, but seem to be very lax in fixing their own misstakes. I Liek Rob would like to hear what result you get.

Mick Fisher · 17-10-2007, 16:34

Just 4 words, Rediculous, Outrageous and Unacceptable. This both describes your issues Darthmuppet and the current state of the ballgame at VM Towers.

You have my deepest condolences and I hope you can get something sorted, one way or maybe another very quickly.

DarthMuppet · 18-10-2007, 11:54

Hope so too. The letter to Customer Concern went today, so we'll see what comes of it. i wonder if richard.branson@virgin.com works.....to be honest, this is the kind of thing he would actually care about, expecially as 2000 people got shafted in the same way.....

The service for me has been perfect for 15 years, and one slipup isn't going to make me move elsewhere (i'm too far from my telephone exchange to get ADSL-2, and i have no BT line anyway). It's also very good value for money when compared to the inclusive offering from Sky. i'm just annoyed that their cock-up takes 10 days to fix, and i lose 10 days of email (and my distribution list membership!) Guess i'll move it all to googlemail instead.

DM

Rik · 18-10-2007, 14:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mick Fisher

Just 4 words, Rediculous, Outrageous and Unacceptable. This both describes your issues Darthmuppet and the current state of the ballgame at VM Towers.

You have my deepest condolences and I hope you can get something sorted, one way or maybe another very quickly.

For once, I actually agree with Mick and thats not very often, this is simply not acceptable, the 24hrs to be reconnected is not on imo.

I would go mad, 24hrs to reconnect, rubbish.

Im a big big VM fan but when I hear the horror stories on here it really does make me realise how good my service has been

I hope you get this sorted soon.

Perhaps a member that has contacts within VM can get this sorted ASAP for you.

r00t · 18-10-2007, 15:11

PM on the way to OP.

No promises, I'll see what I can do.

DarthMuppet · 19-10-2007, 10:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by r00t

PM on the way to OP.

No promises, I'll see what I can do.

details supplied. I wasn't asking for help, but i'm certainly not going to turn down offers :-) Thanks !

DarthMuppet · 20-10-2007, 12:08

Well thanks to someone on 150 who will remain anonymous, i'm finally reconnected. Somehow, when others could not, she managed to tak directly to the folks who do the reconnections, and 2 hours later i'm back. The modem is set for 20MB down, 768k up, but speedtest.net says 4MB down and 200k up, which is worse than when i started.

I'll see if anything changes over the next few days and get back onto them again.

r00t · 20-10-2007, 12:20

**Kevin T** · 20-10-2007, 12:22

Try the speed tests here or here.

Much more accurate than speedtest.net IMO...

dreadnaught · 20-10-2007, 14:34

Hmmmm....both say 4MBit down, 400k up, just what i had before. The CM is configured right, but i do recall when i got the free upgrade from 2MB to 4MB, the modem changed about 4 months before i actually got the benefit of the higher performance. is there equipment upstream from me that would be getting in the way?

what? · 20-10-2007, 15:03

just to make sure, may seem stupid, but have you rebooted the modem since the upgrade?
and it shouldnt take any amount of time for you to experience the speeds increase!

id also recommend not using speedtests at all, in general theyer pretty unreliable.
go to gamefiles.virginmedia.com and download 2 files a the same time.
u should see from here if you're speeds are higher than the 4meg.
1.2mbps on each is roughly what you're looking for.

hope this helps.

oh and btw, i work in tech support and have had cus services agents call through to me before to check things, they cant transfer, but can come thro themselves. the tech support agent you spoke to should have went thro to cs himself and explained the situation to them. then gave you a callback o let you no what was happening.

dreadnaught · 20-10-2007, 19:36

i picked a couple of WoW patches, and they two together peak at about 510kB/s - just what I had before. I've rebooted modem and router, and now they're peaking at about 800k - nowhere near 20mbit, but clearly better. I tried again 10 mins later and i'm back to 500k again. My email is not available to me, so i need to call TS again, so i'll see if they have any more suggestions.

Thanks

DM

r00t · 21-10-2007, 10:05

Recently we are seeing reports of slow transfer rates from the blueyonder mirror servers, gamefiles.virginmedia is located on these servers. Therefore a lot of calls from agents and customers are only getting up tp 200 KB/s speeds on this server, as with any testing of slow speeds its best to use a couple of sites to compare overall test speeds.

www.fuller.zen.co.uk/test
http://ntlspeed.webhop.net/