We've been customers for a number of years, with TV, phone and broadband, paying somewhere in the region of £80 per month. We've got a number of gripes with the service, but predominantly, the main problem we have with the service is the broadband reliability. It ranges from working perfectly and super fast to being none existent, you see.
We get a total drop out of signal to the router and we've had numerous and multiple engineers out to fix the issue. About eighteen months ago, it seemed fixed, one of the numerous engineers finally seemed to crack the problem. It had something to do with the signal to noise ratio on our feed. It seems Virgin broadband is very susceptible to fluctuations in the signal. Whatever the engineer did, it didn't last. About a month ago, it all started again.
So, as anyone unlucky enough to have to had reason to call Virgin Media will attest, I avoided calling 150 for as long as possible. Finally, after it happened during Skype calls, trying to work on a server remotely and generally not being able to use any streaming service one night, we checked the service status page. No reported faults.
With a deep sigh, 150 is called and the endless loop of "are you on wireless?", followed by requests to restart the router begins. Being passed around, followed by promises that it's a temporary area fault that will resolve in X number of days. Not fobbed off by this, you explain that you know more about the fault than they do, and request to be passed to someone not reading from a script. They promise a call will be made to you in the new day, which never happens. Finally, your only option is being a pain in the arse on social media.
Fast forward a number of hoops jumped through, hours spent talking to them, and days waiting around for call backs that have a 66% chance of actually being made at current reckoning, we get a senior area engineer out. He arrives as advised (unusually from past experience - 12noon until 4pm included 6pm once) and does the usual triumvirate of new router (a different version this time), swapping the 'tap' we're fed from and a poke around with signal meters. He can't see a fault and short of telling us the issue is in our heads, he leaves the set up and a resolution of "let's see if this fixes it". No attenuator was fitted, swapped or fiddled with this time. We're told to take a screen capture of the network status of the router when it goes down for aiding diagnosis.
I sit down today with internet radio on, after a few evenings of our Android phones reporting "unstable internet connection" but assumed they were just twitchy as they're relatively new. My radio feed drops for a few seconds. Annoying, but meh, could be wifi issues. Drops again, this time long enough for me to see the device is trying to reconnect to the stream, but the wifi is at full signal. Again, before I can grab my iPad, the device reconnects. Next, it's down for a few seconds. Okay, this is getting tedious. I log my iPad into the router on the correct page to get a capture next time it happens. I'm not left waiting for long. It seems from my experience it actually happens every few minutes, for differing amounts of time. Watching the status page, it's very common to happen and I only notice it drop when the radio cache is exhausted. We've been watching YouTube and NetFlix all week since the engineer, but they're not live so can cache quite a lot of the stream. Radio is a lot less cache happy by it's very nature, and so it's much more noticeable. Luckily neither of us play online games and have been avoiding using our broadband for important Skypes and remote connections to servers.
So, I'm back at square one. To be fair to Virgin Media this time, they are trying to fix the problem, but I did have to call, tweet and email a lot of people to get an engineer out. I'll post updates as and when I get a resolution to the fault, but for now, I'll just have to live with musical statues FM.
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