I want to hurt someone at Virgin Media or Scottish and Southern Energy

[muon]

To be fair SSE are dicks. I went to a job where they cut through the cable and the guy rang up VM. They arranged a call for the next morning between 8 and 12. The customer told SSE and they agreed to go there after 12 to tarmac.

Needless to say I turn up at 8:30 and they had just laid new tarmac. And unfortunately we don't have the ability to dig the tarmac

Can't VM sue/bill SSE or whoever cuts the line?

 

[awinchurch]

Can't VM sue/bill SSE or whoever cuts the line?

I guess so but I really don't know. The problem is when they cut through a cable they also break the ducting and it usually collapses when the re surface it pavement/road.

This means its not as simple as pulling a cable. It needs the road digging and they have to get permission from the council which apparently can take up to 10 days

 

[Deleted member 651465]

I've been on site with builders that have cut through a main BT duct, and caused massive outages. Luckily the guy knew someone local from BT they came around within the hour to cover up the mess.

I'm surprised SSE don't give a toss about cutting through the lines though.

 

[awinchurch]

I've been on site with builders that have cut through a main BT duct, and caused massive outages. Luckily the guy knew someone local from BT they came around within the hour to cover up the mess.

I'm surprised SSE don't give a toss about cutting through the lines though.

The contractors get billed and the money stopped out of their wage so they don't bother reporting it usually

 

[deshepherd]

Where did they cut through the cable ... was a main cable down the street or the cable from the street to your house. Years ago when we first had cable (when cable first came to Bristol and VM was probably still United Artists) ww dug through our cable in the garden ... phoned them up and an engineer came very promptly (and on a saturday or maybe even sunday afternoon) and he did a quick temporary repair (basically clipping the severed cables together) and said that another team would come to properly replace our cable in a few days - which they did. He explained that technically the cables were meant to be buried something like 50+cms down in gardens so that they wouldn't get dug up easily but that was (a) costly to do and (b) would require trenches to be dug across lawns/flower beds etc which people didn't like so the result was they simpy pushed the cables a few cm under the surface and had people like him on rapid response to deal with the problems when people accidentally dug through them.

Maybe the way they handle this has changed since then

 

[deshepherd]

I've been on site with builders that have cut through a main BT duct, and caused massive outages. Luckily the guy knew someone local from BT they came around within the hour to cover up the mess.

I'm surprised SSE don't give a toss about cutting through the lines though.

When I was in SF BAy area ~15 years ago I remember a time when a contractor accidentally dug through a *major* fibre cable ... seem to recall it take several weeks to fully restore service as each fibre had to be identified on both sides and splice back together.

Also, recall someone once relating a story of one monday the lab they worked in found that their ethernet was incredibly slow - n.b. this was way back in the days of fat-wire ethernet. After a bit of investigating they discovered that a contractor had been installing some equipment over the weekend and found this thick yellow cable in the way ... so he'd cut it, moved the new equipment into place, rerouted the thick yellow cable around it and then soldered all the internal wires together to "mend" the cut! Might have worked with RS232 line but with ethernet introduced loads of high frequency reflections that constantly caused the transceivers to see packets as corrupt and wait for a resend!

 

[Rilot]

so why haven't you rang the engineer on his mobile?

No answer....
I finally got some traction when I phoned CS on Friday evening to ask to cancel my service.
Engineer coming 11th July to fix the cables. Oh well, BT Infinity here I come. Install date for that scheduled for 9th.

I'm leaving VM no matter whether they fix it or not. The fact that it took me nearly a week and a half to get beyond "have you re-booted your modem" just beggers belief.