Virgin Media leased line problem

iaind · 12 Apr 2010 at 19:11

Well our 10mb ethernet leased line (Virgin Managed internet access) went down at about 10am today - there's no lights on the terminating unit apart from power. Another site to site line that comes in on the same fibre bundle is working fine though...

I logged it with them 10 minutes after it went down and chased them throughout the day. Keep getting promises that different departments were going to call back with an update, even gave them my mobile so they could update me this evening, but no update.

Does anyone have any tricks to get some info or progress out of Virgin/NTL? We rely on it for all our email, remote connections etc so it's going to cause a big problem if its not back by tomorrow morning!

Dont suppose anyone has a copy of the standard MIA SLA to hand? I believe I should be entitled to service credit if the downtime is above 6 hours and we're now at nearly 9!

bigredshark · 12 Apr 2010 at 20:21

Shout at your account manager is the best strategy I've ever found. They trashed a HCS line we have with them the other week (2x 10Gbit links) to replace a fibre segment which I wasn't best pleased about.

Best strategy, avoid relying on VM for anything in any way important.

alex24 · 12 Apr 2010 at 20:23

Yep, their support is a total joke. You could try the support forums. The tecchies on there get things done a lot faster and more reliably than the phone service, probably even faster even though it's only really checked once a day.

Dangerous · 12 Apr 2010 at 21:11

I find NTL/CW/VM very good for our work 10mb fibre connection. Although our office is in Cardiff which seems to be where the local techs are as well.

iaind · 12 Apr 2010 at 21:51

I can literally see the Newton Abbot POP from my office window, the installation report said the total fibre run was about 300m....how wrong can that go!?

Problem is our account manager left a little while ago and I get passed around from pillar to post in sales. They'll be getting an earful in the morning if it's not up (pings are maxing TTL at the moment)... all my users seem to think it's my fault! gah

katana6434 · 13 Apr 2010 at 11:38

We have got a lot of lines with virgin. The best way is to escalate the issue with your Account Manager or Business services Manager

I have generally found their support to be OK.

iaind · 13 Apr 2010 at 12:29

Well 25 hours after the fault was reported, it's back up

The engineer turned up and told he he's been sitting around twiddling his thumbs since last week - he had only just been made aware of the issue this morning

Cycrow · 13 Apr 2010 at 15:44

iaind said:
Does anyone have any tricks to get some info or progress out of Virgin/NTL? We rely on it for all our email, remote connections etc so it's going to cause a big problem if its not back by tomorrow morning!

one thing that seems to work quite well is to contact head office directly, i had a problem with my standard cable line, which was down for more than a week, i then went to head office and it was back up and running within an hour. You kind of expect the bad service with the cable lines, but u shouldn't have to put up with it with a LL

iaind said:
Dont suppose anyone has a copy of the standard MIA SLA to hand? I believe I should be entitled to service credit if the downtime is above 6 hours and we're now at nearly 9!

if i recall, they do it by a percentage i think, you line has to be up for a certain percentage, i've not really dealt with virgin and LL. Other companies like Demon are very good when it comes to LL, they will compensate you if your connection is down for even an hour

iaind · 13 Apr 2010 at 16:24

Cycrow said:
if i recall, they do it by a percentage i think, you line has to be up for a certain percentage, i've not really dealt with virgin and LL. Other companies like Demon are very good when it comes to LL, they will compensate you if your connection is down for even an hour

It is a percentage, based on number of hours over the SLA. It's a 6 hour fix and you get:

Hours beyond service
restoration target
Reduction in Recurring
Monthly Charges for
calendar month in
which fault occurred
Up to 1 hour 3%
Between 1 and 3 hours 5%
Between 3 and 5 hours 7%
Between 5 and 10 hours 10%
Over 10 hours 50%
SDSL Not available

As we were well over 10 hours over, that's more than 500 quid back, not to be sniffed at!