Virgin media advice

Thiamin

Hi

I arranged for Virgin media broadband,telephone and TV to be installed yesterday and when the engineer arrived they said the cable was not ready outside my house.They called the team that deals with street cabling who came but could not get the cable to my house apparently there is some kind of blockage.They said the blockage is in the road and they need permission from the council to dig it and find the blockage.I find this blockage strange as I know one of my neighbours has virgin already.

I called Virgin today to see what the next steps were.The person at the call centre said they had a note on the system saying installation will take about six weeks.They could not give me anymore info and were very unhelpful.

I already scheduled the cancellation of my previous provider for today and now I face been without telephone and internet for apparently 6 weeks.

Does anyone have any tips for dealing with Virgin?I obviously want to push this along as fast as possible.Is it possible to speak to the 'installations' team?I want to make sure this is on their job list and if so when it is scheduled.the person I spoke to today just told me to wait for them to contact me! Considering the cabling should have been checked prior to my install date to ensure it could be installed on the day arrange I don't have much faith in the at the moment.

Thanks

Nilrem

ducting can be blocked at any point, and it can be blocked to the extent that new cabling can't be run through whilst existing cables can be fine.

For example if a tree root or something else has cracked a duct it can allow mud into the ductwork which will completely stop any new cabling from be run through the ducting and require repair and cleaning out before they can put more cables through, but existing cables can be fine (unless they've been physically damaged by whatever has cracked the ducting) because they're sealed and already down when the blockage occurred.

Unfortunately if it is going to require them to do roadworks to sort it out, I suspect you won't get it much faster as VM have a limited number of crews to do such works (and most will be booked for scheduled and planned works, or may be required to drop smaller jobs to deal with ones that affect hundreds/thousands of users), and they have to get permission from the local council for non emergency work from memory (IIRC the likes of the gas, electricity and water companies can start digging up most roads at almost no notice if there is an emergency, but telecoms, especially for non emergency work may have to get permits from the council etc).

The chances are the people answering the phones won't have any more information, as the system probably won't show exact timescales for such works as there are so many variables, some of which will be totally out the hands of VM (a bad storm knocking out the main lines to a town will trump a street repair that isn't affecting existing customers for example, or if the local council is tardy dealing with a request for a permit).

Unfortunately it's always a risk taken when cancelling one service before the replacement is actually active, at least when it's not something that uses the same facilities to provide the service (it works fairly well for say changing gas/electricity suppliers as the connection doesn't change).

problemcashback

call up your previous supplier, they will be able to keep you connected even switching over your phone number to virgin if you have asked for that will be done once the service is fully set up.


we had the same issue, it was just like that old joke, how many people does it take to change a light bulb. on install day we had guy 1 to do the install in the house, guy 2 to do the work from box outside of house to house even though I told them there was no box outside of the house. so they had to do the same as you, 6 weeks wait and then a team came out connected the box from the junction box 6 feet away to a new box outside of our property line and then later date another 2 guys came out to do the install again. Funny thing was one of the install guys then says he was one of the ones that installed the line from the junction to the new box outside the property.