Well here's where we ended up. Generally pretty shambolic.

- fault quoted as 1 week was fixed in 24 hours, yay, at least we are back from the council car park where we had decamped to get mobile broadband coverage. This may have been triggered because in one of my followup calls the incident was actually logged with an incident number - the first call handler had just told me bad news and not actually logged anything it seems. Lesson learned: report a fault two or more times to see if you get a better answer.

- perhaps a new record: call placed using the service where they text you and start a conversation; an agent was assigned TWENTY hours after the conversation was acknowledged. My previous record on this service was 90 minutes. Lesson learned: don't bother with the text service, just sit in the call centre queue (15-60 mins beats 20 hours 20 mins).

- no communication with customer AT ALL during the outage - they have no way to subscribe for updates, no way to view status online, you can only call the Helpdesk (and sit in queues for long periods) - so as a customer you have no notification that you are back online (this is especially problematic for some faults where you have to reboot your modem before you get online).

- throughout the outage, and still another day later, the call centre is playing a message saying "we are currently experiencing an outage affecting our broadband customers". This is really not helpful - it is unspecific, the caller can't tell whether it applies them, etc. Presumably it keeps call volumes a bit lower, but customers still have no idea whether their specific fault is the one that is being worked on. Far better to have a self-test online diagnostic the way VM consumer have.

Someone mentioned in a post above that they would have liked VM to provide a mobile dongle for an anticipated 1-week outage. This in fact came up on my first call with them -- when I asked how they suggested my business could run for a week, they said they could send a mobile dongle ... then transferred me to the sales team who tried to sell me the product! Not exactly the best way to handle a cross customer

Currently my view of VM Business is pretty low. Outages are not good - more frequent than VM consumer on a short sample period so far - but the way they communicate with customers (or don't) during these outages is hardly fit for a business-quality service. 500Mbps is super, until it is zero.

And I still don't understand how their advertised claim "12 working hrs resolution from first recorded report" turns into "some things might go wrong and we don't have the resilience to route around them so you might lose service for a week, nevermind".

What I really wish for, in a business service provider, is proactivity. VM should be able to monitor their customers, discover issues, and tell us we are impacted. If something breaks in the area at 2am we should get up in the morning to see an email and be able to take emergency action, not begin our day rebooting things, waiting in call centre queues etc etc... Back in the day, we used to have Andrews & Arnold ADSL -- they pinged every customer continually and always knew what had broken. Those were the days.

Chap coming next week to put up a 4G antenna on a tall pole. Time to have proper resilience.

In reply to a post by CSS_1978:

on Voom500 there's a 12 hour SLA based on your business operational times, for me that's 24/7

Sorry but I do not believe that is correct. It is based on THEIR hours. Their website states: "SLA - Site visits on working days during working hours. Working days comprised of Monday to Saturday excluding Bank and Public Holidays; and working hours Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm/Saturday 8am to 4pm".

So at worst case, a fault at 6pm on a Friday would be covered by the SLA if they fixed it at 10am on Tuesday which is 88 hours if you are running 24/7 and if my maths are right. If it required a site visit But you can celebrate getting nearly 14p/hour compensation if they count the end days as whole days.

The SLA is unclear for problems not requiring a "visit", eg network configuration errors (which are not infrequent with VM) -- although see my original post for complete confusion.

(Also "comprised of" is incorrect grammar, suggesting they didn't proof-read their website, but never mind.)

Edited by deleted (Sat 05-Dec-20 13:15:22)

In reply to a post by anonymice:

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.

a few of things I think you and others do need to appreciate :-
1) nothing can be guaranteed to work 100% for 100% of the time, all tech does sometimes go wrong
2)no company can ever totally guarantee a fix time,no matter how well intentioned that company may be,some things may be beyond their control
3) at the moment most companies are not working normally due to covid,so even the most impatient of us need to give companies a bit of slack as the staffing levels may be affected and some staff may have been drafted in to cover others posts at very short notice,posts that they may have had little or no training to do,possibly why you were giving wrong info/timescale on initial contact?