VM admit that STM hours vary without notice

Originally Posted by Druchii

I dunno about 100Gb a week not being a lot mate, to me it's stupid amounts of data. In the past few weeks, i think 3 since it started coutning i've used about 35Gb. And i've been watching episodes of tv and all sorts pretty much none stop in spare time. How can i do this in 35Gb and you in, if i recall correctly, TB's?

1 TV EP 15GB (and i watch a few shows)(1080p h264, and before anyone starts, this is from a legal service)

1 1080p Movie weighs in at 15-25GB as well...

I dont download low quality stuff...100gb/week is nothing these days.

[Druchii]

Originally Posted by TraxData

1 TV EP 15GB (and i watch a few shows)(1080p h264, and before anyone starts, this is from a legal service)

1 1080p Movie weighs in at 15-25GB as well...

I dont download low quality stuff...100gb/week is nothing these days.

Oh, 1080p... Should've guessed.

Ah well, whatever, 720p is fine with me for now...

[popper]

Originally Posted by Sirius
Virgin needs to make the blagger's pay the full price instead of playing to there lies.

So before you have a go at me who pays for his service, Start with the blaggers and cloner's.

Originally Posted by AmAtoL

Exactly right, VM could/should be much more strict on who they sign up for their services.

No credit checks are done, no mandatory DD payments scheme etc.

people know that they can sign up for 20 meg and basically not pay anything until it has gone all round the houses to debt recovery then churn, only then will they pay a piffling amount.

VM does not need these sort of customers on its books but won't do anything to address it due to the customer base figures.

You wouldn't believe how much is spent on outsourced debt recovery agencies chasing up these wasters, and for what, for them to do it all over again in 3 months time.

Much stricter credit control is needed, but it will never happen.

Still hasn't discouraged the hundreds of thousands who can't pay or won't pay

sirius, you know full well its NTL etal that made the problem in the first place.
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/34...discounts.html
Stuart makes the point very well
"Unforetunately, NTL were desperate to retain as many customers as possible. As such, they seemed to encourage retentions to keep customers at all costs. This has led less scrupulous agents to basically make up deals, just to keep the figures up.

Note: I don't know if they did encourage it, but they certainly didn't seem that active in discouraging it either"


AmAtoL,your getting angree over your misconception of how you think VM works, rather than how VM really works.

the No.1 thing you need to take onboard and retain is ,
Virgin Media (and ex-C&W/NTL before it at least)
charge one month PAYED IN ADVANCE OF services .

in other words, the service your using right now, was already payed for in advance by you last month,and this is all mandatory as you put it.

even though you, as a potential new customer, are always asked to pay the initial £25 deposit, and for your first months services in advance, you can not officially sign up for any VirginMedia services without a credit check.

how exactly they justify a credit check when your paying in advance a 'pay before you go' as it were, is amazing.

you couldnt and cant even officially sign up to, (never mind get it activated), the Virgin Media broadband without a direct debit and your first payment taken.

if you as an active customer do not pay your bill that month, or even its just an accounts mess up and it shows as in default by mistake or inaction from a Ccare worker (yes, thats happens too), Virgin Media will and do auto disable your cable modem so you cant use it, so no 3 month anything from VM.

as for your point about the VM accounts outsourcing costs, yes your right but not for the reasons you might expect.

its known that Virgin Media accounts etc have infact contracted and payed 3rd party companys several hundred pounds per physical disconnection at the customers outside wall cable point.

notice thats not the street cab, but the persons actual home .

they did infact manage to disconnect the coax adaptor joining the external cable to the internal house cable and walk away to the van.

the only problem was that customer was infact 2.5 months payed up in advance .

now thats something to get mad about.

you might be thinking its a scam artist trying something at the the users house, not so....

yes you guessed it, that customer was me, and i (well lets just say i convinced him to get out of the van with the removed adaptor and ) had him call his Virgin Media accounts contact and make sure he had the right address.

they confirmed they has sent him to disconnect my address, but it was in error and i was indeed 2.5 months pay up in advance and they instructed him at my insistance to re-connect the remove coax adaptor.

it was he that informed me of the costs involved, and how they get payed for every disconection valid or not as long as its on the sheet, and even more, they can take 3 days to come back and re-connect an adaptor for you, and get payed again for the re-connection at the same price.

after he had gone, i followed up in several Virgin Media departments to get confirmation that his call was registered on their system and it was really official, IT WAS.

then we have your last point, Virgin Media selling the so called debt and your personal data to the DRA and CRA's, a very nice bit of cash flow there.

not to mention the fact Virgin Media and this so called debt are many times the fault of VM accounts policy, weather deliberate or incompetence, by continuing to bill for services after the customers have infact canceled their contract, hence the phantom debt being sold to the DRA's.

[piggy]

Originally Posted by popper

sirius, you know full well its NTL etal that made the problem in the first place.
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/34...discounts.html
Stuart makes the point very well
"Unforetunately, NTL were desperate to retain as many customers as possible. As such, they seemed to encourage retentions to keep customers at all costs. This has led less scrupulous agents to basically make up deals, just to keep the figures up.

Note: I don't know if they did encourage it, but they certainly didn't seem that active in discouraging it either"


AmAtoL,your getting angree over your misconception of how you think VM works, rather than how VM really works.

the No.1 thing you need to take onboard and retain is ,
Virgin Media (and ex-C&W/NTL before it at least)
charge one month PAYED IN ADVANCE OF services .

in other words, the service your using right now, was already payed for in advance by you last month,and this is all mandatory as you put it.

even though you, as a potential new customer, are always asked to pay the initial £25 deposit, and for your first months services in advance, you can not officially sign up for any VirginMedia services without a credit check.

how exactly they justify a credit check when your paying in advance a 'pay before you go' as it were, is amazing.

you couldnt and cant even officially sign up to, (never mind get it activated), the Virgin Media broadband without a direct debit and your first payment taken.

if you as an active customer do not pay your bill that month, or even its just an accounts mess up and it shows as in default by mistake or inaction from a Ccare worker (yes, thats happens too), Virgin Media will and do auto disable your cable modem so you cant use it, so no 3 month anything from VM.

as for your point about the VM accounts outsourcing costs, yes your right but not for the reasons you might expect.

its known that Virgin Media accounts etc have infact contracted and payed 3rd party companys several hundred pounds per physical disconnection at the customers outside wall cable point.

notice thats not the street cab, but the persons actual home .

they did infact manage to disconnect the coax adaptor joining the external cable to the internal house cable and walk away to the van.

the only problem was that customer was infact 2.5 months payed up in advance .

now thats something to get mad about.

you might be thinking its a scam artist trying something at the the users house, not so....

yes you guessed it, that customer was me, and i (well lets just say i convinced him to get out of the van with the removed adaptor and ) had him call his Virgin Media accounts contact and make sure he had the right address.

they confirmed they has sent him to disconnect my address, but it was in error and i was indeed 2.5 months pay up in advance and they instructed him at my insistance to re-connect the remove coax adaptor.

it was he that informed me of the costs involved, and how they get payed for every disconection valid or not as long as its on the sheet, and even more, they can take 3 days to come back and re-connect thay adaptor for you, and get payed again for the re-connection at the same price.

after he had gone, i followed up in several Virgin Media departments to get confirmation that his call was registered on their system and it was really official, IT WAS.

then we have your last point, Virgin Media selling the so called debt and your personal data to the DRA and CRA's, a very nice bit of cash flow there.

not to mention the fact Virgin Media and this so called debt are many times the fault of VM accounts policy, weather deliberate or incompetence, by continuing to bill for services after the customers have infact canceled their contract, hence the phantom debt being sold to the DRA's.

i agree with everything you say except the disconnect cost the lads in our area get £15 a job and yes they do get it wrong and they can take several days to come back and rectify there mistake, being fair to the disconnect lads it is usually a mistake in the the paperwork from customer services

[lostandconfused]

Originally Posted by popper

sirius, you know full well its NTL etal that made the problem in the first place.
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/34...discounts.html
Stuart makes the point very well
"Unforetunately, NTL were desperate to retain as many customers as possible. As such, they seemed to encourage retentions to keep customers at all costs. This has led less scrupulous agents to basically make up deals, just to keep the figures up.

Note: I don't know if they did encourage it, but they certainly didn't seem that active in discouraging it either"


AmAtoL,your getting angree over your misconception of how you think VM works, rather than how VM really works.

the No.1 thing you need to take onboard and retain is ,
Virgin Media (and ex-C&W/NTL before it at least)
charge one month PAYED IN ADVANCE OF services .
snip
.

I agree with all of your post apart from the bit about paying in advance.
Everyone is billed a month in advance, but isnt paid in advance.
As an example, your billed on the first of the month for the period covering 1-31st. The customer then has 28 days to pay the bill. So assuming they pay at the last possible day they are only paying for 3 days in advance.

Even if you have a direct debit, that is collected 14 days after the bill date so are paying for 17 days in advance.

But the bill isnt even considered late until 28 days after production and even then no action is taken until 38 days after production if no payment has been made so then your not paying in advance at all.

Also the first £25 payment comes off the first bill so isnt held, unless the customer is a particularly bad credit risk then a £100 deposit is taken which is held on the account

[AmAtoL]

I cba quoting any of your post popper but I think you also need to have a rethink on how VM works in the real world.
Thousands of people do not pay by direct debit and never will.
People may pay £25 initially but then go ahead and not pay any more bills, until final reminders, DRA, then months have past.
I wasn't referring to physical disconnections at the household, but the hundreds of thousands of pounds paid out to DRA's before it gets to that stage. I'm saying miss out those agencies and just wave goodbye to the persistent non payers.
I know cock ups can occur, and that modems can be turned off, it happened to me when we changed banks but the new one only took the DD for tv and phone and not BB.
Anyway got to try the connection for gaming now

[popper]

i knew you would Lost as you remember me posting the original.

the key facts are, its still payed in advance, no matter how you want to split it.

and VM are spending extra cash to 3rd partys to physically disconnect a customer.

incuring yet another cost for physical re-connection ,instead of the far simpler and zero cost electronic option available to them.

BTW, if anyones interested in following that canadian ISP being throttled theres another update confirming it.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/B...rottling-92973
Bell Canada Confirms Throttling

[lostandconfused]

Originally Posted by popper

i knew you would Lost as you remember me posting the original.
snip

sorry i couldnt help myself!

[popper]

Originally Posted by AmAtoL

I cba quoting any of your post popper but I think you also need to have a rethink on how VM works in the real world.

Thousands of people do not pay by direct debit and never will.
People may pay £25 initially but then go ahead and not pay any more bills, until final reminders, DRA, then months have past.

I wasn't referring to physical disconnections at the household, but the hundreds of thousands of pounds paid out to DRA's before it gets to that stage.

I'm saying miss out those agencies and just wave goodbye to the persistent non payers.

I know cock ups can occur, and that modems can be turned off, it happened to me when we changed banks but the new one only took the DD for tv and phone and not BB.

Anyway got to try the connection for gaming now

well cant be arsed, is as good a reason as any , infact VM and many other business base their whole extra profits on that fact, CBA sending a DPA notice being the current topic elsewere.

im constantly re-evaluating many things as time passes, dont you ?

as for "Thousands of people do not pay by direct debit" thats a very small % of users on the VM broadband isnt it (currently something like 4+ million BB or more ) and of that thousands, only a very small % of that, have a problem paying on time sometimes.

after all VM's own rules, dont allow you to sign up to BB without it, people might choose later to change after the initial connection and DD but most dont as they dont want to incure the unlawful non DD charges (yep, theres another one).

sure, VM saying 'goodbye to the persistent non payers.' i can agree with upto a point.

however if people are paying enough not to be electronicly disconnected by the auto system already in place after the month, then VM or anyone else has no valid reason to complain.

enjoy the game

[piggy]

another good reason to physically disconnet people is stop them buying/obtaining equipment and then getting all services for free!!

Originally Posted by piggy

another good reason to physically disconnet people is stop them buying/obtaining equipment and then getting all services for free!!

And what if new tenants move in and want VM? they then have to go through the costs (vm, that is) of connecting them back up, its not worth it.

[ceedee]

Warning: briefly returning to the original thread topic


Apparently the irregular and unpublished changes to the times that STM operates were isolated "trials" and the email from TS (see the first post) was just a mistake.

"Virgin Media Technical Support - Dxxx Lxxxxxx" <news-support@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message news:83rGj.28758$XI.19343@text.news.virginmedia.co m...
>
There were no changes to the STM over the bank holiday weekend, or any
weekend for that matter, it's not that flexible as to change the settings
for different days of the week. Any trials for STM will only be affecting
one or two areas, for instance prior to the 20Mbs rollout, the Preston area
was given it first as a trial. Another recent case where STM was applied at
the wrong time was found to be settings on the UBR, and once identified was
corrected

The next time that anyone finds that their connection speed has been drastically reduced -- as though you'd been STM'd, but outside of the 4-9pm peak period -- I'd encourage them to post a message to the TS newsgroup requesting they check your current status.
(It would be useful to include the first part of your postcode in the subject line.)

[brundles]

Originally Posted by ceedee

Warning: briefly returning to the original thread topic


Apparently the irregular and unpublished changes to the times that STM operates were isolated "trials" and the email from TS (see the first post) was just a mistake.


The next time that anyone finds that their connection speed has been drastically reduced -- as though you'd been STM'd, but outside of the 4-9pm peak period -- I'd encourage them to post a message to the TS newsgroup requesting they check your current status.
(It would be useful to include the first part of your postcode in the subject line.)

Call me cynical if you like, but "trials" seems a rather handy way of saying "You'll be STM'd at some random time and it would be unreasonable for all of our support staff to know whether it's right or wrong because it is a trial".

Originally Posted by ceedee

Warning: briefly returning to the original thread topic


Apparently the irregular and unpublished changes to the times that STM operates were isolated "trials" and the email from TS (see the first post) was just a mistake.


The next time that anyone finds that their connection speed has been drastically reduced -- as though you'd been STM'd, but outside of the 4-9pm peak period -- I'd encourage them to post a message to the TS newsgroup requesting they check your current status.
(It would be useful to include the first part of your postcode in the subject line.)

VM run different STM trials all the time, it wasnt a mistake, some area's are changing, i also think you need to remember they will lie through their teeth about things until it becomes too public (like they did with the first STM trials).

Infact, VM staff are not allowed to discuss about STM trials so it would seem pretty obvious that they'd just deny it

[ceedee]

Originally Posted by brundles

Call me cynical if you like, but "trials" seems a rather handy way of saying "You'll be STM'd at some random time and it would be unreasonable for all of our support staff to know whether it's right or wrong because it is a trial".

"You might think that.
But I really couldn't comment..."