UPC/aka Virgin Media internet service down

Impetus

The UPC cable internet service went down in my location (Cork) at 19h10 approx this evening. I have no idea how wide the problem is. I am assuming that most people affected have no way of posting to boards.ie during the outage.

I phoned their technical support number. An RVA told of a 25 minute waiting time for an answering agent. "We are working very hard to resolve this". What is this? Before Virgin became involved one often got an area-specific service outage message, followed by an option to remain on hold if you were not calling regarding the affected area.

The company was bad, and is getting worse since it entered a franchise agreement with Virgin.

I have several cable services in various parts of Europe, and the phones are answered by them all 24/24h 365 days a year - with multiple language options - eg press 1 for French, 2 for Italian, 3 for English etc.

Dysfunctional Ireland gives a cable monopoly to one company, and Comreg seem to be part of the problem in renewing the license without unbundling the basic fat broadband monopoly and letting multiple service providers and content providers use the same infrastructure.

20h17 and still no service. Called again. The RVA message now advises a 30 minute wait for support.

Impetus

Does anybody have working UPS/Virgin broadband this evening (ie 19h onwards on 6.1.2016?).

There have been lots of views - but no comment suggesting someone has working cable internet tonight...

droidman123

Impetus wrote: »

Does anybody have working UPS/Virgin broadband this evening (ie 19h onwards on 6.1.2016?).

There have been lots of views - but no comment suggesting someone has working cable internet tonight...

Mine is down for the last 3 hours.we had an electricity power outage at about 6 o clock this evening,but it came back at about 8.30 and the router was working perfectly until about 9.00 pm,since then..nothing!

Impetus

droidman123 wrote: »

Mine is down for the last 3 hours.we had an electricity power outage at about 6 o clock this evening,but it came back at about 8.30 and the router was working perfectly until about 9.00 pm,since then..nothing!

08.15/7.1.2016 This morning tried the Virgin UPC system again - re-booting and making sure co-ax was tightly screwed into box. The 'online' light remains off at my end on the STB. Maybe your case is different given that you had a power outage in your area? But then you say your power is back on, you had a short period of coverage on Virgin and then off again, if I read you right.

Very strange.

leche solara

You might get more responses posting this in the Talk to... Virgin Media section

Impetus

leche solara wrote: »

You might get more responses posting this in the Talk to... Virgin Media section

Thanks - I did not know about that section. I have been speaking with them this morning - they don't open until 9 - which is rather dozy .... but they have a monopoly over fat pipe residential services in IRL. This monopoly must be ended......

Arnold Layne

Broadband down in Galway this evening

Arnold Layne

Broadband down in Galway this evening

doubledown

Down in Blackrock now. Also seeing reports of it down in Dublin 4, Killiney and Sandyford.

Tv is fine.

January

Down in d15. Phone and TV fine. Cannot contact upc via their helpline.

doubledown

Back now

Impetus

I phoned Virgin at 09h01 on 7.1.2016, and he gave me an “appointment” for 09 to 13h00 on Friday. (Elsewhere, ie where I live most of the time, when the cable/telco makes an appointment, it is for 08h30 and he is usually there on the dot – even though I wouldn’t mind if he came 30 mins late because he was over-running on another job or stuck in traffic.


I called on random neighbours, and found that their Virgin service was also off since around 19h the previous night and most of them had reported it.


I called Virgin a second time – “do you not know that there is a neighbourhood breakdown in all or part of Sunday’ Well (Cork).” She checked a list of area outages and said mine did not appear listed. I told her about my ‘survey’ and she undertook to put the new facts into her system.


Within ten minutes or so of the second call, the entire neighbourhood was back online. It would appear to me that somebody just had to press a few buttons to fix an error. An error that caused multiple subscribers not to have service. An error that was not recognised from the pattern of calls received.


This is gross incompetence.


Points arising:
1) The phone line quality used by Virgin tech support is appalling. When speaking to somebody who is a non-native English speaker or heavily accented, it makes communication even more difficult. I was calling from a 64k ISDN channel. I had poor sound quality on both calls at my end. Nothing to do with mobile phones.


2) The online diagnostics system invites one to enter one’s account number to get service status. I did this last night, and it said all systems were green – ie working. A) I don’t have TV so how could that be working. The internet was not working and C) the cable phone line hasn’t worked for over a year.


3) I attempted to fill out a form to report the fault last night, and the form was unable to recognise my street address, which is a 200 year old house with a number on a street of numbered houses in a city. I tried all combinations – leaving out punctuation and ‘ characters to no avail.


4) Virgin’s database appears to me as an outsider to be very flaky. I wonder if this flaky database was also the cause of the ‘breakdown’ given that they were able to fix the issue to rapidly after I took great effort to determine the scale of the breakdown in terms of sampling subscribers.

ThisRegard

January wrote: »

Down in d15. Phone and TV fine. Cannot contact upc via their helpline.

Only parts of D15, may even have been local to your street. Mine was fine all day and night.

Impetus

1. It seems to me that Virgin (which I know is owned by Liberty Global) have moved customer service offshore (probably Philippines). This implies that the private customer data has been shifted abroad, to a non-EU country, with few data privacy rules. The quality of the phone connection is appalling. The answering agents seem to be equipped with cheap headsets, that operate on a “push to talk” basis (ie when the agent speaks it opens a channel to the caller in Ireland). The people I dealt with have a Pilipino accent and combined with the awful 16 kb VoIP sounding call quality, it makes conversation extremely difficult. I work internationally on the phone all the time, and use ISDN to make sure of a good quality phone connection – even when calling countries with third world telecommunications infrastructure like some Asian countries, North America and some Latin American countries. This issue makes it difficult to get the message across on either side. I have no problem talking to Pilipinos or anybody else. So long as either I can speak their language (of which they have 186 different languages) or they can speak one of mine. And the phone line is crystal clear – not darlek noise from a distance. And they can get the job done in terms of fixing my problem (and not be part of the problem).

2. UPC seemed to have had a good system to detect area outages. Virgin can take half an hour to answer at night. Most people probably don’t hold – so their outage is not recorded. From my recollection, UPC asked the caller to enter their phone or account number and use touch tone menu selection to get to the broadband outage menu item. At that point, UPC’s computer knew who the customer was, and that they were about to report a fault more than likely. Making it easy for a system to determine areas of likely outage, without even talking to the customers. Virgin Media Ireland seems to be missing this, and therefore are not as responsive to area outages. I went around the following day to several neighbours and found that their Virgin service was not working. Many of the neighbours had service 'appointments' for someone to call from Virgin to 'fix' their non-broken (at the customer end) installation. Which is a dumb waste of time. For the customer (who has to stay at home for half a day because the 'appointments' have no precise time, and for Virgin scheduling needless 'truck rolls'. I called Virgin again (for about the 20th time) and was finally connected to somebody who read my lips – there is an outage in Sunday’s Well (Cork). Ten minutes later that outage was fixed. Which makes me think that some software deficiency or human error (either in the Philippines or Dublin or elsewhere) caused the outage. I have further evidence of data management problems.

3. When I called, and entered my account details while waiting for an agent (phone number or account number), I found on several occasions that the answering agent who took the call had a ‘blank screen’ in front of them. In a well organised call centre, the caller ID or account number is automatically passed on to the customer support system to present the callers’ account page to the answering agent. I found that while the system ‘knew’ me from my phone number, the answering agent had a rubbish (invalid Irish) phone number for me on screen. I called out the number for correction. The agent entered it. I asked him to call the number back. He read the same rubbish phone number. I called it out again. And this time it was properly recorded.

4. The phone service I am paying for form Virgin has never worked since a new Technicolor box was delivered to me to replace a defective Cisco box. Multiple calls have got nowhere on this.

Virgin Media has inherited a universal service obligation and have a monopoly in Ireland. Their systems, lack of respect for customer data, short opening hours, and general flakyness of their system is not acceptable.

Yesterday they announced an increase in broadband headline download speed to 360 Mbits/sec which is irrelevant in the circumstances of their high contention rates (high number of people sharing the same bandwidth in a neighbourhood). It seems to me that it is yet another tactic to put people off using competitors services - who are restricted generally to copper connections via the Eir network.

Ireland urgently needs to set up a platform where the universal service provider element is a regional door to door FTTP (fiber to the premises) company. Different regions could have different FTTP contractors. Each offering an open INEX.ie type service where ISPs, Netflix, Google, RTE, and any other content provider (including Virgin) could make themselves available to all households connected to the single national fibre point of delivery. All use the same 'set-top box' standard with two 'SIM' card slots

The manner in which the cable monopoly license was renewed in favour of Virgin's predecessors also needs to be examined. I am unaware of any public tender or consultancy exercise to find the best solution for the customer.