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View Full Version : Extreme lack of bandwidth, maxed out UBR


Sebazy
23-09-2007, 16:36
Hihi all, a rather sombre first post to start with but eh, pleased to meet you all :wavey:

Now, for the last few months I've been plagued with a rather shockingly bad connection, to the extent where I'm really rather jealous of those people managing to get 4mbps. I first noticed my speeds being consistently substantially below what they should have been a couple of months back, but I was still getting around 300kps most of the time which was enough for me so I didn't bother reporting it to support.

Unfortunately now even on off peak hours I can generally expect to get below 100Kps even to VM's own FTP, at 2pm today I was getting 40Kps out of gamefiles.virginmedia.com, the 100meg test binaries from Zen internet were barely managing 10Kps. Now I'm on the XL package so I think I'm fair in saying that even with the lack of a real service level agreement, this kind of broadband performance is an insult for 40 quid a month :rolleyes:

The real annoyance is, when I reported the issue 3 weeks back, the tech I spoke to was brilliantly helpful, the ticket was made and whilst he did make me pull my network to bits, he appeared to route my upstream through a different UBR which made a huge difference to my connection, getting me from ~80Kps at the time to a very acceptable 600Kps, this lasted for a week or so before my connection went down and I had to restart my modem promptly going back to the same issues again.

Second time I called in, I got another UK tech but this time he wasn't able to help insisting that it wasn't possible for me to be rerouted, again I had to direct connect but this time he wasn't able to do anything but insist that the problem was being worked on.

The next two calls were both picked up by overseas 'techs' and unfortunately both were little more than a waste of money with both of them not having the knowledge or ability to do anything beyond offer apologies and assure me that the problem is still being worked on.

About the only thing I know for certain is that all 4 calls confirmed that my UBR is the root of the problem, the TX channel on it is completely swamped, is there anything at all I can do about this myself beyond repeatedly wasting money on the support line? The first tech appeared to be able to reroute my connection, why can none of the others do it? Is there anything I can say to help coerce them into actually doing that again? :confused:

For reference, I'm in Plymouth on ubr08.newt.blueyonder.co.uk, even though I'm on the XL package I'm mostly concerned about gaming performance and connection quality, currently packet loss is low, but the connection is noticably 'lumpy' with packets often being significantly delayed and out of sync.

For reference:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2007/09/7.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

myriauk
23-09-2007, 17:12
I feel your pain, my connection is just utter crap today.

xkennyx
23-09-2007, 17:40
Dude, im in the same boat as you there. Im on UBR 11 Newton Abbot and my speeds are awful. Today i am barely managing 500b/s. i just find it amazing how when the service was blueyonder/telewest it was perfect. 10mb all the time anytime, now VM have taken over they dont have a clue on what there doing. I had a tech out to look at my problem the other week, He said he was leaving VM because they are piling to much on him and they dont have a clue how to run all of this. Apparently there are 4 Technicians in Plymouth soon to be 3.

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2007/09/6.png (http://www.speedtest.net)
Kenny

EYEZ
23-09-2007, 21:21
Posted in the NewsGroups -
Work is expected to be carried out on this UBR on or around 16 October 2007
however this can be subject to change

Kind regards,
Sabri Barka
Virgin Media Technical Support

Im suffering the same .... maxed out connection = 28k d/load - 38k upload
And this work was supposed to be done by the end of Sept !!

So i wouldnt rely on this Date wud u ?
:td::td:

xspeedyx
23-09-2007, 23:32
well lost 3/4 connection tonight and not even shaped

Mr.X
24-09-2007, 01:13
If its your UBR thats oversubscribed their should now be notes on your account confirming this. Speak to customer care .If they tell you to call tech support tell them that you have already spoke to tech support , they have confirmed this issue and tell them to have a look at your CC notes (all calls to tech support and the issues raised are logged) and and either request to be downgraded to M or L package. This type of issue is unlikely to be resolved in the near future.

They didnt swap your UBR around they've probably just changed your upstream channel ID which is not a fix but more of a temporary workaround as all the other channels on that UBR are likely to be heavily subscribed as well. Tell them you think you should be be compensated for the slow speeds you have had to put up with for the last few months. Your calls charges to tech support should also have be credited back to your account as the issue is on their end (you can confirm this with customer care). Hope this helps

xspeedyx
24-09-2007, 10:01
Mr X how can customer care do this I have never seen this on the cc notes tech support can only look into this as customer care reps dont really know what a ubr is how ever we can only credit back when the fault has been resolved

Mr.X
24-09-2007, 18:28
Customer care dont need to know what a UBR is. It should be apparant from the CC notes left by tech support that the customer has an issue with slow speeds.

Tech support CC notes should be done in plain english so other depts can understand them. IE something like .....ahc called cust advised issue on UBR causing slow/intermiitent speeds.This is a problem on our end..........whats hard to understand about that?

As far as I'm aware its only advisory that we apply credit once the issue is resolved, its not company policy. Whatever way you look at it there should now be tech support notes on the account advising of the issue.

If it wasnt for the new ICSTIS regs and most importantly AHT it would be possible for Tech support to go through to customer care and explain the issue to them. Unfortunately the needs of the client come before the needs of the customer and until this policy is reversed customers will carry on getting sub standard support.

xspeedyx
24-09-2007, 20:48
have u seen tech support they cant speak english let alone type english the comapny needs to rethink its policy

Mr.X
24-09-2007, 21:21
Putting ICSTIS regs to one side a minute, its AHT thats the cause of most of the issues. 610 seconds to deal with a technical call is simply not long enough. Scrap AHT and a lot more problems would be resolved to the customers satisfaction. Dont forget stray to far over AHT and your gonna be out of a job. I cannot think of another job where taking ownership of a call and going out of your way to help a customer is going to get you sacked.

xpod
24-09-2007, 21:46
Mr X how can customer care do this I have never seen this on the cc notes tech support can only look into this as customer care reps dont really know what a ubr is how ever we can only credit back when the fault has been resolved
__________________


When our first 3 month half price bb period was put in place back in June it was offered & arranged by the tech who i`d just spent the hour on the phone to at the time.

When i called up at the end of that three months period(because things were worse still with the new modem even)the tech eventually agreed with everything i told him & escalated the problem.....again.
The new call charges were now in place so what he could`nt do this time was arrange the continuation of the current half price agreement, as i was kinda expecting this time round.
He told me i would need to call retentions myself to have that current agreement continued though.They would see the notes ok he said so,thats what i did....

Retentions though tried to argue that because the notes said i was getting 4-12MB then they would happily give me another 3 months at the 4Mb price of £25 this time.....tch tch:erm:
Being the stubborn git i am and because i felt the speeds being the same should mean the price being the same i politely declined their offer and called up Customer Services instead....(the cheek i hear them scream):D

The lovely lass at CS could see all the notes of everything that had taken place the previous hour or so and after reiterating our tale of woe she put me on hold,called up retentions and come back 2 minutes later with the continued half price deal for another 3 months.

But the issue still did`nt get fixed for couple of weeks:)


It dont matter what department i`ve called i have found that one person will tell you one thing while the next will tell you something completely different.
Especially when it comes to notes or asking to be passed to someone else.
I`ve had them blatantly lie to me on the phone,deny things took place,blame everything bar themselves etc etc etc......

Try anyway.:)

Mr.X
24-09-2007, 22:16
If is wasn't for AHT there would be no need to pass you from one department to another. In and ideal world you should only have to make one call and the agent does the chasing up on your behalf. Unfortunately that wont happen till VM changes their policy of giving agents a finite time on the call (610) seconds for tech support. But dont hold your breath.

piggy
24-09-2007, 23:54
It dont matter what department i`ve called i have found that one person will tell you one thing while the next will tell you something completely different.
Especially when it comes to notes or asking to be passed to someone else.
I`ve had them blatantly lie to me on the phone,deny things took place,blame everything bar themselves etc etc etc......

this is true of most big companys not just virgin......not a very good defence but in the modern call center world it will get worse before the public backlash makes things get better.

xspeedyx
25-09-2007, 00:13
good old vm customer care I have found the most people that complain bout customer services are the ex ntl customers I feel sorry as vm is now the old ntl

D_Skids
25-09-2007, 00:36
I had a good argument with Customer Services about my crap connection earlier tonight.

I had finally had enough after days and days of either poor connection speeds or no connection.

The guy went through the normal procedure, bypass the router, turn off the firewall, reboot into safe mode. Basically anything where they can blame my kit and not theirs even though I explained nothing has changed at my end.

But I did everything they wanted and he said the modem looks OK and is reporting a good speed.

I then pointed out to him that whilst talking to him I had done a speedtest and it was running slowly (1.5mbps at that point I think). He then got me to download a file (f1test.notlong.com) which I did (at about 400kbps).

He then said 'Whoa that is really slow!'

No S**t! I then asked him why he was ready to tell me that everything looked fine before I had done the speedtest, surprisingly he couldn't answer that.

He has now promised to refund the 18 minute phone charge and an engineer will be out between 8 and 12 tomorrow.

What annoys me the most is the way they think they can con people who don't have a technical understanding of their equipment and assure them nothing is wrong when clearly there is (and charge them to tell them that!)

After the engineer has been out and whether or not he sorts the issue I will be contacting VM for compensation for the quality of the poor connection I am paying top dollar for.:mad:

Mr.X
25-09-2007, 00:51
Was that an Indian call centre you got through to by any chance and did he get you to go into your modem config pages at any point?

D_Skids
25-09-2007, 01:22
I am not certain that it was an Indian call center. The guy did have an accent but I couldn't swear to it.

No he didn't take me into the modem config pages, he did get me to go into Network connections and tell me the IP Address (I guess he was testing me to make sure I had bypassed my Router as he had asked!)

Mr.X
25-09-2007, 01:38
If he was able to see your modem on his end then he would have known what your IP address was without having to go into your network connections. He would have also been able to see the mac address (Customer Premise Equipment CPE) of whatever the modem was plugged into and from this information its possible to even tell what manufacturer made your router/network card. What modem are you using ? Actually forget it.



That Tech wont be required just found out what your problem is skids...........................................

Raised : 24 Sep, 2007 13:01
Name : Terry Maddock, Outage Surveillence Team
Ticket Number : 553646
Estimated Resolution : 8hrs
Status : Opened
Priority : P2
Services Affected: Broadband Internet

Description :
Broadband customers in the NN3 area may currently
be experiencing loss of connection to the
Internet. Our engineers are investigating this
issue.



Virgin Media apologise for any inconvenience
caused.

- Virgin Media Technical Support

mcfc66
26-09-2007, 00:30
HI all,

Firstly, over the last few months this forum as helped me greatly with my issues of shaping and slow speeds... not too mention all the times I have had no connection at all...

Last Thursday, I rang and asked for a refund due to the poor quality service on my BB, as per they made me ring the 0906 number and promptly told me my PC was the problem... on Monday of this week an engineer came out and tested my modem, instantly told me there was no issues except for being over subscribed in the M24 area..uncannily enough my speeds in the morning are superb..2200 but come 3pm they die and max I can get is about 400-500

On the 10mb connection I had no issues but with the 20mb its almost impossible to connect to my newsserver...Daft question are VM blocking newservers now.

Thanks in advance

D_Skids
26-09-2007, 01:09
If he was able to see your modem on his end then he would have known what your IP address was without having to go into your network connections. He would have also been able to see the mac address (Customer Premise Equipment CPE) of whatever the modem was plugged into and from this information its possible to even tell what manufacturer made your router/network card. What modem are you using ? Actually forget it.



That Tech wont be required just found out what your problem is skids...........................................

Raised : 24 Sep, 2007 13:01
Name : Terry Maddock, Outage Surveillence Team
Ticket Number : 553646
Estimated Resolution : 8hrs
Status : Opened
Priority : P2
Services Affected: Broadband Internet

Description :
Broadband customers in the NN3 area may currently
be experiencing loss of connection to the
Internet. Our engineers are investigating this
issue.



Virgin Media apologise for any inconvenience
caused.

- Virgin Media Technical Support

After doing everything the CS guy said, bypass router, disable firewall etc (even though I knew they were fine) the guy said he could see my modem and it looked fine so see how I get on without the router connected.
I told him that before he went I had just done a speedtest and it was running at about 450/500k.
He told me to do a download (f1test.notlong.com) while he watched the modem.
He then said 'Oooh that is really slow!!!!' which is what I had been trying to tell him.
He then told me he would refund the 18 minute phone call and send an engineer out first thing in the morning.
When the engineer arrived I said to him I had been onto 'a forum' and I had heard there was an issue in NN3 (Thanks again Mr X) and he told me I shouldn't believe what they say.
He then changed the modem power supply as it was non standard (NTL to blame for that) and put newer attenuators on.
He then did some tests and obviously wasn't get much better results.
After a phone call to his workmate he told me that there was an issue in the NN3 area at the moment!!!!

What a joke

What annoyed me most was that the CS guy was prepared to let me accept that it was Ok after bypassing my modem and disabling the firewall which I proved to him was not the case. How many less technical people have had the wool pulled over there eyes like that I wonder?

Mr.X
26-09-2007, 02:14
What time did you call to report the fault? If it was before 1.00pm then the tech tech support guy wouldnt have been aware of the problem on the network. Looks like the tech who called out either didnt check for network outages or the information simply wasnt passed on to to him.

Trent
26-09-2007, 11:29
If is wasn't for AHT there would be no need to pass you from one department to another. In and ideal world you should only have to make one call and the agent does the chasing up on your behalf. Unfortunately that wont happen till VM changes their policy of giving agents a finite time on the call (610) seconds for tech support. But dont hold your breath.

AHT i pursume is the same a CHT (Call Handling Time) the contact centre industry, indeed business in general, works to something called KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) this is the basis from which they work out staffing requirments, projected call volumes and Bugets. Like all Private Companies Virgin Media will be trying to do this as "cost effectively" as they can which probably means you are slighlty below your required staffing level, especially if you take into account attricion and also long term sick.

Your AHT should be calculated as follows. Take out the top 10 - 15% of call lengths and also the bottom 5% of call lengths then find the mean average of the different and this is the AHT. Now because its an average your managers should recognise that some calls will be longer and some are shorter and so what they should be looking at is your own personal AHT and seeing if this is somewhere within about 1 minute of the average.

beleive it or not AHT is actually part of customer service. Some people would take 8 minutes to resolve an issue that another advisor can complete in 3. If this is the case then it would suggest advisor A has some performance issues. Now coming back to how this ties into customer service.. if you have 120 advisors like advisor A then that means on each call this group of 120 advisors take then are losing 600 minutes of customer service time or 10 hours per call (assuming they all take the same number of calls in a day lets say they take 35 calls) or 350 hours a week (assuming 5 day week). hopefully you can see where this is going. If at the moment you have 50 calls waiting an average of 9 1/2 minutes then even investing in these advisors and reducing there average AHT by 1 minute would get all of thoughs 50 calls in the que answered before the service level is affected and before the customer gets irate about being on hold so long.

its not ideal and it does depend on the company investing in its agents but AHT isnt your enemy. well unless they reduce all 120 advisors to 3 minutes and decide they are over staffed by 80 advisors but again thats not AHT thats the companies call.

Ok i'm off my soap box now.

D_Skids
26-09-2007, 16:53
What time did you call to report the fault? If it was before 1.00pm then the tech tech support guy wouldnt have been aware of the problem on the network. Looks like the tech who called out either didnt check for network outages or the information simply wasnt passed on to to him.

It was about 9pm!

Mr.X
26-09-2007, 18:59
Quote..........It was about 9pm!


There's no excuse then. Looks like a comedy of errors

Firstly the Tech support who you spoke to originally either didn't check the outage page or he simply failed to see the issue. It should of been a case of ...... I'm sorry Mr Skids but theres a problem in your area at the moment......we are a aware of the problem and we'll get it fixed as soon as possible.

In order to book a engineer, Tech support have to raise a workorder. These workorders are (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) monitored by the outage team. If theres a network problem then the outage team should have closed the workorder .You should then have recieved a phone call explaining that the engineer has been cancelled and isn't required.

If you wanted to make a complaint and I would suggest you've got some good evidence to back your claim up.
The time you called would have been logged on the system and secondly you can produce the outage ticket which proves that they were aware of the issue at 1.01pm, 8hrs before you rang.

In order to make a complaint you could speak to customer care and tell them you wish to raise a CCCS (customer complaints service). Explain the issue to them and I would also request a call back of a manager (managers hate having to do this) to explain what went wrong. The number of CCC's raised are monitored by OFCOM, get enough of these and they will have to do someting about the level of service.

If anyone has a complaint with regards to Virginmedia I would suggest that they insist on raising a CCCS. They are time consuming to deal with and cannot be ignored.

If customers where made aware of the complaints procedure and used it then things would have to change.

Hope this helps

D_Skids
26-09-2007, 20:26
Quote..........It was about 9pm!


There's no excuse then. Looks like a comedy of errors

Firstly the Tech support who you spoke to originally either didn't check the outage page or he simply failed to see the issue. It should of been a case of ...... I'm sorry Mr Skids but theres a problem in your area at the moment......we are a aware of the problem and we'll get it fixed as soon as possible.

In order to book a engineer, Tech support have to raise a workorder. These workorders are (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) monitored by the outage team. If theres a network problem then the outage team should have closed the workorder .You should then have recieved a phone call explaining that the engineer has been cancelled and isn't required.

If you wanted to make a complaint and I would suggest you've got some good evidence to back your claim up.
The time you called would have been logged on the system and secondly you can produce the outage ticket which proves that they were aware of the issue at 1.01pm, 8hrs before you rang.

In order to make a complaint you could speak to customer care and tell them you wish to raise a CCCS (customer complaints service). Explain the issue to them and I would also request a call back of a manager (managers hate having to do this) to explain what went wrong. The number of CCC's raised are monitored by OFCOM, get enough of these and they will have to do someting about the level of service.

If anyone has a complaint with regards to Virginmedia I would suggest that they insist on raising a CCCS. They are time consuming to deal with and cannot be ignored.

If customers where made aware of the complaints procedure and used it then things would have to change.

Hope this helps

I will do I will also be looking for some compensation.

Funnily enough my Internet has only just come back up after being down for about an hour!!

Arrow
27-09-2007, 08:18
Vm are a bad joke, i toatally agree with the above comments about lying
incompetence and different versions of events from different operators.
You have to doublecheck everything. they finally placed me on a 3mth half price deal to compensate for the poor speeds and then I found they had billed me at the full price, which has only been rectified because I chased it up

The slowdowns however continue - dial up would faster for web browsing
sometimes when they are at their worst. The 3 mth deal has been extended for another 3mths after I complained again because it hasn't been resolved.

I've had engineers out 3 times because of terminally slow speeds
Each time they say everything is o'k at my end, they have blamed it on the effect to the network of the 20mb roll-out ???

I will raise a CCCS but there we have another complaint I asked them how to raise a compalint and they did not tell me about this, instead nebulously referring me to write to some address on the back of the bill

D_Skids
28-09-2007, 23:09
YET AGAIN my Broadband has been either off or slow last speedcheck peaked at 1191kbps for my 20Mb connection.

I am extremely annoyed at this moment.

I rang customer services to complain and after waiting 20 minutes to get through I was told they can't do anything I need to speak to technical.

So I rang them and they first of all wanted to go through the checks etc, so I asked them to explain how that would help seeing as I did this for them a few days ago and at that time they admitted a problem and sent an engineer out.

They checked my modem and told me it was losing packets (why didn't the first engineer spot this)

I asked them why they didn't sort it the first time when the engineer came out but they could not check his report (which is a joke in this day and age)

So now I have got to wait until Monday morning (and book time off work) for an engineer to come out and probably tell me that he can't find a problem.

I also said to the tech guy that I wanted to speak to a manager because they need to be provinding me with some form of compensation for this hassle. But he couldn't put me onto a manager (or even give a name of one) but assured me that one will call me back within 24 hours. We shall see what happens with that but rest assured I will be back on the phone again if I haven't heard from one.

As you can guess I am seriously p***sed of with the ineptitude that Virgin have shown when dealing with this and I am very seriously considering going elsewhere for my broadband unless they can pull their fingers out.

If there is anybody out there that can provide me with any other telephone numbers to further escalate this I would be very appreciative.

Darren

Mick Fisher
28-09-2007, 23:21
YET AGAIN my Broadband has been either off or slow last speedcheck peaked at 1191kbps for my 20Mb connection.

I am extremely annoyed at this moment.

I rang customer services to complain and after waiting 20 minutes to get through I was told they can't do anything I need to speak to technical.

So I rang them and they first of all wanted to go through the checks etc, so I asked them to explain how that would help seeing as I did this for them a few days ago and at that time they admitted a problem and sent an engineer out.

They checked my modem and told me it was losing packets (why didn't the first engineer spot this)

I asked them why they didn't sort it the first time when the engineer came out but they could not check his report (which is a joke in this day and age)

So now I have got to wait until Monday morning (and book time off work) for an engineer to come out and probably tell me that he can't find a problem.

I also said to the tech guy that I wanted to speak to a manager because they need to be provinding me with some form of compensation for this hassle. But he couldn't put me onto a manager (or even give a name of one) but assured me that one will call me back within 24 hours. We shall see what happens with that but rest assured I will be back on the phone again if I haven't heard from one.

As you can guess I am seriously p***sed of with the ineptitude that Virgin have shown when dealing with this and I am very seriously considering going elsewhere for my broadband unless they can pull their fingers out.

If there is anybody out there that can provide me with any other telephone numbers to further escalate this I would be very appreciative.

Darren
If VM are not or cannot supply you with the service they have sold you then you need to speak to the Retentions Dept and either renegotiate a jointly amicable deal for the level of service you can recieve or failing that, negotiate for a way out of your contract. To contact Retentions, call CS then it's option 4 then option 3.

Good Luck :)

D_Skids
01-10-2007, 00:29
Snip
I also said to the tech guy that I wanted to speak to a manager because they need to be provinding me with some form of compensation for this hassle. But he couldn't put me onto a manager (or even give a name of one) but assured me that one will call me back within 24 hours. We shall see what happens with that but rest assured I will be back on the phone again if I haven't heard from one.
Snip

Guess what, it has now been well over 48 hours later and no call back from a Manager and the tech guy promised me that somebody would call me back

I will see what the engineer does on Monday and whatever the result I will be contacting Customer Services.

I am now looking into other Broadband providers