Virgin Broadband installation

Aod · 11 Oct 2010 at 02:18

Mornin' All!

i ordered Virgin 50Mb broadband about a week ago, and at the time of ordering they said the earliest Engineer date was the 18th. not much i could do about that, so i accepted it.
On the monday morning, however, i got an email saying there was already a Virgin account active at my address (from the previous tenants).

When i called Virgin up to deal with the previous-account issue, i also asked why an engineer needed to install the equipment, as the house is fully wired up for cable from the previous tenants anyway, and the Woman on the phone said that if that was the case, and because i was only getting the broadband, without phone or TV, that they could just send me a "Self Installation" box, to which i said "perfect" and i thought that was the end of it.

however, when they rectified the issue with the previous account, they sent me another email saying that it was all dealt with and that the engineer would arrive on the 18th, even though i thought i'd arranged to install it myself.

when i phoned them again (which i have to pay for too!) the woman on the phone said that because i was getting the 50Mb package it required an engineer to do something funny to get it working, and i couldn't do it myself :confused:

so, do any of you have Virgin 50Mb or know about why i wouldn't be able to install it myself? i've been without broadband at home for a week and i think another week's going to kill me.

i've been using my Mobile Broadband in my laptop but that's gone crazy and stopped working, so i'm tethering with my phone, at first by WiFi, but that was killing the battery by the sheer heat, so now i've had to pay for a wired-tethering app, but i get such crap signal anyway that my downlink speed is only .2Mb (30KB/s)

wij · 11 Oct 2010 at 10:11

When I had VM a few years ago I upgraded from the 10Mbit package to 50Mbit and they insisted that an engineer was sent out - its a complete con as all the bloke did was swap the modems and phone them to activate it.

Hardly something that even a technically incompetent monkey couldn't have done for themselves.

I refused to pay in the end and also subsequently told them where to go stick their service 6 months later when they overloaded my UBR and refused to acknowledge the fact and when they finally did the fix date kept on slipping and slipping.

I now have a pair of lovely Be lines supplied by AAISP and get 40Mbit down and 5Mbit upstream and don't have to deal with the bull**** of incompetent support staff or their ruddy offshore call centres.

arknor · 11 Oct 2010 at 10:18

50mbit is more delicate and they need to make sure the signal levels are spot on

John24 · 11 Oct 2010 at 16:13

wij said:
I now have a pair of lovely Be lines supplied by AAISP and get 40Mbit down and 5Mbit upstream

How much are you paying for that?

alex24 · 11 Oct 2010 at 16:19

wij said:
When I had VM a few years ago I upgraded from the 10Mbit package to 50Mbit and they insisted that an engineer was sent out - its a complete con as all the bloke did was swap the modems and phone them to activate it.

Hardly something that even a technically incompetent monkey couldn't have done for themselves.

I refused to pay in the end and also subsequently told them where to go stick their service 6 months later when they overloaded my UBR and refused to acknowledge the fact and when they finally did the fix date kept on slipping and slipping.

I now have a pair of lovely Be lines supplied by AAISP and get 40Mbit down and 5Mbit upstream and don't have to deal with the bull**** of incompetent support staff or their ruddy offshore call centres.

Sounds a lot like my recent experiences. Avoid Virgin if you can!

wij · 11 Oct 2010 at 16:32

John24 said:
How much are you paying for that?

Just shy of £100 a month including the two PSTN lines and usage that I get through.

Not cheap, but we now use AAISP for all our work connections so it makes a lot of sense to use them at home.

And TBH when I compare the costs to what I'd have to pay someone like Zen for the data that I can get through in a month (iPlayer HD eats quite a lot in the evenings!) its only about £20 a month more for a much better service.

Werewolf · 11 Oct 2010 at 17:33

arknor said:
50mbit is more delicate and they need to make sure the signal levels are spot on

Yup, the signal levels for 50mb need a tighter level of tolerance, and they need it across a wider frequency than the lower tiers (the lower tiers only need one clear frequency range 50mb needs 3 or 4 cleaner frequency ranges).

The engineer may be able to get away with plugging the modem in and checking it's stats on a laptop/computer if the line is clear and the signal strength is right straight off the bat, if however it isn't he has to find what part of the frequency range is wrong and attempt to correct it (they have a handy dandy frequency spectrum analyser for this I believe, and a host of different attenuators to try and balance out the frequency ranges and strengths).

So it really does require an engineer to at least try and make sure it works...(of course the engineer might miss the fact that the signal strength is varying over the course of the day, but at least he can check it whilst he's present).

When they rolled out 20mb it was pretty much the same for a while, they needed to make sure that the lines were up to that, as at the time I believe 20mb used a frequency modulation that the lower tiers didn't but gave better throughput (QAM 64 I think), once they'd rolled out 20mb quite widely they were able to do away with manned upgrades in areas they knew were good (and I believe moved most of the lower tiers over to QAM 64 as well).

Aod · 11 Oct 2010 at 18:27

Fair enough then. i hope i can get a good chat out of the engineer when he turns up on monday

till then, however