Broadband: Consumer Advice

[Kanoe]

Could do with some help if anyone has the knowledge, ordered Phone, TV, Broadband from VirginMedia over a month ago and they came and installed it on Saturday 21st Feb.

For a couple of days all was good (168Mbps down, 15Mbps up) then last night got home and broadband wasn't working. Called them up and they ran some tests but said they couldn't find a fault.

It's still not working today. (It's starting to bring back the horror I had with them a few years ago at a different address when I without internet for 4 months and that only ended because I finally got them to release me from my contract early with no charge. I really don't fancy going through that again!)

How long I have got before I'm locked into the 18 month contract? I think its 2 weeks from install but would welcome confirmation of this cause if it's only 7 days I have to move quickly!

As I work from home a fair bit I need some internet access so if I have to start a long fight with them to get out of this contract I will to pay for another line and broadband in the meantime anyway so if I don't have long to exit then I need to get started ASAP.

[mycarsavw]

Broadband T&Cs - http://store.virginmedia.com/the-leg...broadband.html

But I'm sure 168Mps down is classed as broadband, sounds more like fibre?

Fibre T&Cs - http://store.virginmedia.com/the-leg...es.html#ending

[Ttaskmaster]

168Mbps down, 15Mbps up

HOLY.......!!!

My down is 0.7Mbps on a good day - The best I've ever heard of is a consistent 75Mbps.
How the heck are you on that much??!!

[Kanoe]

Well its advertised as up to 150 down 30 up.

Speedtest wont even finish the test and Pingtest gives the following:

http://www.pingtest.net/result/118024441.png

It's a joke! Which I hadn't of switched!

[Jonatron]

Does this help:
http://www.simplifydigital.co.uk/faq...ng-off-period/

[Kanoe]

I hope thats not the case cause it says 7 days from order which was over a month ago and it was only installed 6 days ago.

Having read the VirginMedia T&C it pretty much says I'm locked in for 18 months already but that is absurd given that you have no idea how good something is going to be until they actually install it.

Need to do more digging.

[Dareos]

I'm not in till the weekend but pm me your Mac address and I'll check it it out

[mbrown839]

This may sound obvious but have you tried rebooting your router? My BT connection slowed to a crawl recently, from my usual of ~6Mbps (very rural area so I can't really complain) to 1 if I was lucky. After cursing them for about a day, I rebooted my router and all was fine again. It might not be that, but I'd give it a go just to rule it out.

[Millennium]

I would echo what mbrown suggested (reboot).

It's just possible your router got a firmware upgrade over the wan connection (broadband) so it now needs a hard reset... low probability but it may solve it, I had something similar on plus-net ADSL once.

[Kanoe]

I would echo what mbrown suggested (reboot).

It's just possible your router got a firmware upgrade over the wan connection (broadband) so it now needs a hard reset... low probability but it may solve it, I had something similar on plus-net ADSL once.

Yeah done hard resets, soft resets, different PC's, wired, wireless, different cables, reseated the virgin cable all to no avail.

The problem seems to with the upstream it doesn't seem to actually get a lot of the data to VM the speed is 0.0 Mbps with a fair amount of T3 errors, the download is choppy but I think thats being caused by the T3 threshold being exceeded and it soft resetting the connection from what i've read online.

I might phone the citizens advise to see what I can do cause so far in 7 days of having the connection 4 have been OK and 3 have been useless.

[Smudger]

Dareos works at VM, see his post above...

[Ttaskmaster]

Is there not typically an initial 'bedding in' period with new installs?

[Kanoe]

Going to try and convince them to send an engineer first to see if they can do anything as the phone tech support still reckon there is nothing wrong with it. Failing that i'll be in touch Dareos. (Many thanks for the offer!)

[Kanoe]

Well they have now admitted there is an issue in the area and they will send someone out. Hopefully this will do the job, they said utilisation in the area is 6% (apparently not enough to be called an outage) but this dropped off and if anyone is interested its a load of FEC errors on the upstream.

[DannyM]

When Virgin are good, I dare say they are flawless... But when an error pops up, well glhf.

[Spud1]

When Virgin are good, I dare say they are flawless... But when an error pops up, well glhf.

They are a prime example of how buying + re-branding a company and sinking millions into marketing, does not fix the core problems. Still shocking customer service, unreliable broadband connections and awful TV set top boxes.

Still, I hope they sort it for you Kanoe - its not a nice problem to have!