VM Business: 1 week estimate to fix!?

So we moved from VM consumer to VM business thinking things would be better. Not so. We are on "Voom 500" which has a guaranteed 12-working-hour fix time.

Today it is giving 20% packet loss (ie service unusable) and we are told it will take them a WEEK to fix. Something about needing to rebalance signal across the area, "which requires a lot of computations". Hmmph.

Should I regard that as a credible excuse; or is there somewhere further up in VM Business where I should start applying pressure?

By the way, the contracted service level apparently "doesn't apply for things that are faulty elsewhere in the network" and in any case, all it does is cause them to pay me £2.45 a day, which is certainly not going to make them work any harder.

Hi,

see this thread me and someone else have the same issue https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/virgin_cable/f/466... I wonder if your both in the same area as me.

We are in Oxford. I’ve had to move to a local car park for my day’s work, where I can get mobile broadband ... next step is to put up a tower I think. VM Business are a complete disappointment: long hold times, vague problem tracking, no feedback on progress so you have to keep calling them (10-60min wait, answer 10 questions, describe the fault from the top etc).

I wonder how anyone runs a decent size SME on this service.

So the engineer has been, plugged plugged there tester in and bam 568mbps download speed, so they thought it was my network, however he then started to get a few messages from other engineers from Liverpool and Bolton having the same issue so it would seem it's a bigger issue, the engineer has gone away now to raise it upwards to see if they can fix it.

from what I understand the cases he knew about we were all on static ip's on business lines.

What... The bad customer service continues over to business users too, saved me some time and agro, thanks for posting.

I currently manage and run 3 consumer Virgin connections, I've just had a hard time getting my latest property hooked up costing me some valuable time and money and considered getting business service but fact that there's no rush and that compensation rate is [censored] poor to say the least.

I wouldn't say it's all bad customer services, or a service as a whole, my connection is fixed now by the looks, my understanding it was country wide issue so hopefully the op will come back and say theirs is fixed too, I can't fault the business service because 99% of the time it works as it should, and from what I've read if you have a dynamic ip or a single static, these connections really good, the engineer that was here to day told me he doesn't see many 13 static ip connections, and also you could see that the engineers had like a whatsapp group which helped see that there wasn't just me with the issue, otherwise I'd be stuffed right now.

And if the service was really that bad I wouldn't of renewed for the next 2 years either.

I'm glad its fixed now, but the response from Virgin in the OP is that basically a week is fine and basically we'll give you a partial refund on the service...

In my boat I'm probably better off looking at the HomeWorks add on but it sort of shows that unless I'm paying thousands a month they won't really care about small/medium business users.

I hear what your saying about the week lead time to fix it, but I rang tech support 18:00 yesterday and today 09:00 an engineer was at my door, on Voom500 there's a 12 hour SLA based on your business operational times, for me that's 24/7, and by lunchtime it was fixed, and for SMB's these types of connections are not that expensive really, and like me if you can't operate with out a connection then get yourself a backup line, or as you say dig deep and get a DIA Line installed, and this is an option I really want to go down at some point as I have some stuff hosted to the internet.

I appreciate this but they've still told somebody that if they can't fix it on the visit then tough ***s, in business that doesn't cut it.

In an ideal world the engineer would leave behind / wire in a 4G modem to carry the service until confirmed fixed, but while this is an option its not something that is given in this case.

I'm not trying to devalue the service in anyway but after being told I should be using the business service (such as Voom 500) all I'm actually hearing is it no better than having the residential service with Homework's add on.... and I could get Gig1 as well.

But that all depends on where the issue is, if an engineer turns up at the property(like for me today) and they run their tests and find nothing wrong with the line from the property out to the network what are they suppose to do, the customer needs to ensure that there's nothing wrong with the internal network, all switched and routers are performing as they should, I use the likes of solarwinds to monitor my network, thankfully for me, the engineers were communicating with each other and that helped them identify that there was a wider issue.

As for leaving a 4g dongle well VM offer this as an additional service you can take, I can't see how practical it would be for an engineer manage this 4g dongle loans when they are better focusing on fixing network faults, however in my case because I have 13 static ip's this isn't an option as my service couldn't continue using a 4g dongle, although I do have a a netgear nighthawk hotspot on 02 for the worst case.

I guess your option works for you, but for myself a residential service just won't work as you don't get the likes of static ip ranges, SLA's, and I'm even thinking of getting FTTP from Zen they offer a business 900mbps down 100mbps, but again I would never run with just 1 line for my business, connectivity it far too important and having some resilience is key.

At the end of the day it's all down to what's your business, what impact would it have on your customers, reputation, and how much productivity would be lost having no internet service and once you've understood this only then can you decide which service is best for you.