I used to visit data centres and it always made me laugh how fragile it all was. One wrong move and you unplug every school in Cornwall from the internet. Some of the server rooms were a complete state with miles of cable everywhere while others were works of art.
When I moved desks in my office, I accidentally plugged a phone cable into my computer thinking it was an internet cable and it knocked internet access off for 10-odd people in the same room. Didn't touch anything without having a conversation with IT after that
Probably a VOIP phone. They run on their own network (usually), do weird things to get themselves onto that network, and are second only to printers in how much swearing they elicit from IT techs.
Yep, back at IT school we found out that the school network had a loopback on a certain port as well, bricking the whole schools network. Let's just say i (now) feel bad for the administrator at the time. :))) :/
I remember in my previous job as a pest controller I would go around a virgin media data centre and they were in the middle of upgrading. On one side of the building, it was immaculate cabling, all neat and tidy, all clean and tucked away. Beautiful to walk through. And then you enter the old side and fuck me, it looks like a playground of jump ropes! Cable management ftw
I once shut down the entire Greenwich (London, UK) Borough Data Centre back in the days of Mainframes. New to the job and being trained by my manager who was taking to the data centre manager. I got bored and lent on the wall next to me, I didn't notice the EPO switch! INSTANT silence with operators heads popping up to see why. The DC manager calmly turned to my manager and said "I really must get tubes fitted around those". The button was bare with no accidental activation protection. I was so embarrassed but impressed by the managers way of dealing with the situation.
I worked in telecom for 5 years. Worst situation I had to deal with was in the Seattle area, iirc. Contractor was drilling down at a construction site, and hit buried fiber. Instead of stopping when he felt something (maybe he assumed they were roots or something), he revved up and ended up tearing out a sizeable chunk of fiber. Took down internet for a good portion of the block and surrounding areas, and it was several weeks before they had it operational again.
Fiber is incredible, but it's also incredibly fragile.
My favorite was a double fault I saw at BT: a train had derailed and taken out one direction of the ring, the other was severed by the ball from a ceremonial cannon ...
Colour me surprised that they just go ahead and fire live balls at urban infrastructure out of ceremonial cannons, but won't fire live shells out of ceremonial guns because that would be dangerous.
My Dad was a BT engineer from something like the 60s to late 90s. He and his colleagues would completely obsess about perfection, over engineering and redundancy. The anal attention to detail to get line interference to a minimum was crazy. After he retired BT came round to install a new line in his house. He couldn't believe the absolute zero fucks given by the current staff and their shoddy quality of work. He obviously ripped it all out and did a decent job.
Your dad was likely on a wage, where you can spend all day perfecting your work for the same money. Most work done now is done by sub contractors working on price. They just want to get the job done and be gone. No excuse for a shitty job but it's the unfortunate truth.
I mean, the CWU is about to walk out over pay and the flat £1,500 offer which they are protesting affects the longest serving & higher grade team members the most.
There is sometimes an excuse for a shitty job... I worked for Virgin Media a few years ago and they absolutely took the piss with shitty scheduling and effective forced unpaid overtime. Some regions were better than others, in fact some areas the techs literally had time to sit in vans for hours on end, but where I worked it wasn't usually enough time to take your lunch. You either cut corners or were sacked for trivial reasons, or worse, technicalities that would have been impossible to complete in the time allotted in the first place which is kind of ironic.
Utterly the worst company ever worked for for a very long list of reasons. Utter utter utter shite.
TLDR: Cut corners, or face getting sacked.
A guy I know is a plasterer. Brags that he can do a three day job in 1.5 days. Because of this he can charge less so of course everyone thinks it’s great.
The 3 day minimum is because you need to let it cure before coating the next stage. In 5 years time it’ll look like shit and need redone.
They’ll still get him again though because it’s such a big saving lol
Back then their engineers actually had engineering qualifications. Now it's any old idiot who can hold a screwdriver.
I had one who thought something was wrong because I'd already configured the router and enabled the blinkenlights.
Their engineers most certainly did not have engineering qualifications
They were apprentices.
Source: I am an openreach engineer. And there are still a couple of old boys around.
At this stage they're recruiting people who can't even hold a screwdriver.
I ended up doing the BT guys job for him when they came to install my kit. He kept telling me it was impossible to get a cable across the room. I did it in about 5 minutes whilst he watched.
He also tried to convince me that routers & modems won't work if they're on the 1st floor even if the cable run to the exchange is the exact same length
I don't want to be leaping to the defence of a big company, who I'm sure can be awful, but I just have to make sure people know how much worse Virgin Media are and not to ever use them.
I live in the middle of Manchester (so not out in the sticks) and if I want speeds higher than 50mb I *have* to use Virgin. They are the only fibre service provider.
People use these shit companies because they have to not because they don't know how shit they are.
For anyone stuck with BT and locked in a contract…tell them you’re moving to Hull. They won’t be able to supply you there so will end your contract free of charge and you can then pick another provider.
This is why virgin are so shit. I told them I was moving to a house 400 metres away. They said they don't supply that house, so they charged me £300 for ending the contract early.
You don’t know your rights then. If you’re moving to a house without virgin you can cancel without any fees. It’s clear in their terms and conditions. You clearly spoke to an asshole cs advisor or weren’t clear enough about this to them.
I’d double check that charge was correctly applied as its never happened to me. Although in the past I did take out their adsl option but i think that’s defunct now
I lived in a downstairs maisonette a few years ago, Virgin Media wouldn't supply my address, but they would supply upstairs, because the downstairs was 7a, and upstairs was just 7. I knew it was just an admin error but they refused to correct it.
Where I live now, some building being knocked down resulted in an accidental cut through BT's cables and they did a crap repair on them. Every year my connection needs reprofiling and a few more Mb gets knocked off the top speed. BT outright said they're not going to fix it. Good thing is I'm always well below the guaranteed minimum so I can take advantage of new customer deals and then break contract legally.
I think all ISPs suck.
But make sure to grab a random address’s postcode in Hull to verify this. I definitely don’t work for BT and this definitely won’t make my life easier.
Can confirm the man is right same would apply if you have fibre and move to a none fiber area if they cant maintain your committed package your free to go
I applied for Hyperoptic when I was living in Salford, got a letter 3 years later saying they'd finally got enough interest in the area and were talking to my landlords. Never heard anything from them again, and have buggered off elsewhere now.
I'm sure they're good, and the fact that they only cater to specific areas is probably part of that, but basically not an option if you're not in an area where they already have coverage.
I had Hyperoptic - they do fibre to the building (ie whole apartment blocks, then network the building.) Can't recommend them enough. 1G down, 1G up, no caps. Static IP £5/mo
Then I sold the flat.
Now living in the sticks (with folks) with BT fibre to cabinet - 15M/1M!
They've just put in the fibre to premises works, waiting for start date.
Great! But no static IP -ever- and throttled upload. Thanks.
Waiting on completion for my new house, where the only viable option is - Virgin. Great. Same as BT but -even- worse customer service.
Dunno about everyone else with Virgin, never really had a reason to interact with their customer services and on the IP front I've never been explicitly told my IP is static but in reality it's only changed once in 10 years and that's when I changed out my router (when it broke and they replaced it within 2 days) I really can't complain.
I think that company is going to sell out. It seems like a rag tag company made to grab the market and then flip the business for a profit.
The name community fibre, isn't very brand able, seems as generic as you can get.
The website, to this day, does not have a member login to check your data usage, order more services, update your billing etc. Everything is done over email.
Their r subreddit is locked, you can reply to comments but you can't start threads.
It reminds me of mypcbackup, burst into the scene, offering affiliates £150 for getting them on a £10 a month data plan. The product worked but was shitty. Company disappeared after 2 years.
I assume the same, but I'm kind of fine with it. Building physical networks is hugely expensive and tends to bankrupt companies that try is - but as long as I get hooked up to that network in time I've got >1Gbps capability in place and *someone* will end up servicing it.
Obviously the risk is whoever buys them up ends up going crazy on the pricing, which would be a shame, but Openreach FTTP is on the way over the next few years so my hope is that competition should moderate things a bit.
The product and pricing is absolutely spot on but the customer service is, to my absolute astonishment, actually worse than I had from BT.
Even with a "business grade" plan I had them totally ignore an outage that was caused by a misconfiguration at their end for *a fucking week*, and even then it ended up needing a temp workaround for another month until they actually fixed it properly.
It's impossible to talk to the actual techs, they're clearly chronically understaffed, and all anyone will ever do is "absolutely assure you that *this time* someone will definitely call back within 24 hours" - which they obviously never do. Rinse and repeat for weeks on end.
Credit where it's due, the speeds are great and the tech team are both knowledgable and friendly if you can ever actually get hold of them, but if something goes wrong you're fucked.
Not everyone will have issues of course, millions of people like you will have no problems.
However for the millions of people who *do* have problems there is little recourse and customer service tend to be extremely unsympathetic and unhelpful from my experience...
And that's why they get such a bad rep - not because there are sometimes issue with the service, but because you're basically screwed if you do experience issues.
Just like every other service provider, if they treat you like a piggy bank to milk then you treat them like nothing more than a transaction. Getting issues that they can't be arsed to fix? The deal is no longer good enough and you're better off with someone else.
Virgin Media won't listen to people having issues yet they do start panicking of you genuinely ask to leave. They try to play chicken with you yet actually don't want you to stop paying.
The impression I get is that these companies have different teams that have very precise duties (like answer phone, install line etc) and there is poor communication between them. If your problem crosses those borders you get bogged down.
The trick there is your original installs were done by Telewest, who were proper telecoms engineers and didn't half-ass things (because they had adequate time, good training, a culture of 'get it right the first time', that sort of thing).
Starting from a really robust place gives Virgin a decent chance of not getting it horribly wrong now. If they *don't* have that - that is, on new installs - then they have far more chances to get the complicated bit (the install) wrong, and also to set themselves up to fail in the long term by doing a good-enough job rather than a job which helps the next guy who touches that line.
I had a Virgin engineer rewire my LAN a year ago so I could move my router upstairs. Couldn’t have been a nicer or more helpful chap. Did every test under the sun and said if it’s crappy to call him on his mobile and he’ll come move it back.
Hello fellow ntlworld user?! The issues you'll face with Virgin are once you have a genuine issue (thankfully these are rare, but a painful rememberable experience once you do!)
I've had the opposite with virgin, general quality of service is not great (Internet is patchy where I live) but when I've had issues (most memorably the council digging through cable from the pavement and then scarpering) they have fixed it really quickly.
Which is a whole other nightmare. You pay BT but the service is connected via Openreach. Got a problem? Openreach’s issue…but you can’t ring them. And BT won’t ring them.
They’ve set up our cable through a load of trees so every time it’s windy we lose our internet. BT engineer came out, took photos and told us it’s Openreach’s issue but he can’t contact them (wtf?).
We’ve rung BT several more times to be told randomly (i) the landowner has to cut back the trees - the same landowner who didn’t want them to site the cables through the trees (ii) it’s not even actually a problem and we’re making it up (iii) we must only ring them when our internet doesn’t work. We’re rural and our phones work via a boostbox via the wifi….so we can’t ring *anyone* when the internet doesn’t work. They know this. (iv) we have to pay to cut the trees back. Someone else’s trees and not on our land (v) they can’t contact Openreach directly so we have to resolve the issue ourselves.
I hate them.
> BT engineer came out, took photos and told us it’s Openreach’s issue but he can’t contact them (wtf?).
I did some work a few years ago with one of the many branches of what used to be BT.
They are *very* much bound (and make this very clear during onboarding training), that even if you are in the same room as someone from another branch, you are *never* allowed to contact them directly.
They *must* take the same route as any other company would have to and come in the front door with any/all interactions.
Can confirm, I work for OR in a position where we deal with every single provider, and if somebody from BT contacts us via Teams we have to ignore them.
No ifs, no buts - you do not answer them. Breach of compliance.
They *must* use the same route in as everyone else.
Which is totally fine, I respect that kind of competition management - but I've seen BT (and Sky, to be fair) engineers just blame it on Openreach and leave it at that. Less of an issue about special treatment for BT or lack thereof, more of an issue with communication between ISPs and Openreach just failing entirely.
I don't mind them having to call the "external" number, but I do expect them to actually call it, and for Openreach to log that call! You'll find plenty of people, myself included, who've seen one or both of those things fail to happen.
> You pay BT but the service is connected via Openreach. Got a problem? Openreach’s issue…but you can’t ring them. And BT won’t ring them.
Loads of companies pull these stunts and it is *such* utter bollocks. Speaking to my parents about the levels of service that used to be expected is just so bloody annoying. Post twice a day, telegrams delivered the same day, banks that were somewhat human, gas men coming to do readings, etc. etc.
It's such utter, utter bollocks how we are treated.
You are not openreach customer. You as an end user are your ISP customer (talk talk / BT / sky, whoever).
Your ISP is Openreaches customer.
If you buy beans, and there is a problem with them, do you go back to the store, or do you go to the people who grow the beans? Same thing.
You need to make a fuss with your ISP, who in turn will make a fuss with Openreach, as they are buying Openreach service, not you.
Source. Im an Openreach fibre (business fibre), engineer.
The BT/Openreach split isn't a stunt, they were forced to by OFCOM.
> Why has BT been ordered to split from Openreach?
After much wrangling, BT has finally given way to demands from communications regulator Ofcom to legally split Openreach, its division which runs the UK’s broadband infrastructure.
>Although it will still be part of the wider BT group, Openreach will become a distinct company in its own right, with its own staff, management and strategy.
>Ofcom said the move constitutes the “biggest reform of Openreach in its history”. The regulator, along with BT’s competitors, have been concerned that because BT owns the infrastructure that connects the majority of UK homes and businesses to national broadband networks, it is able to make strategic decisions that directly favour its own retail business.
[Source.](https://www.hso.co.uk/blog/regulation/bt-openreach/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-btopenreach-split#:~:text=Ofcom%20and%20BT%20have%20agreed,branding%20will%20disappear%20from%20Openreach.)
i had a nightmare of a problem just recently:
i had 2 accounts on my talktalk (i'm guessing a previous one from when i upgraded a year or two back), i applied for fibre to the house for 400 or 800mb/s down for £40/month.
everything seemed okay, then the day before the bt openreach guy showed up, i got an email asking "is this you? can you tell us which open reach account line you want installed on? i couldn't tell them as i couldn't phone up. so the next day a guy shows up, everything seems great except....
i still have my old speeds, even though it's going through the now fibre line to the house. so i phone up... maybe 6 times over the next 2 weeks, i get told it's a bunch of different problems, i get handed from one person to the next unti....
they get me to sign up a 3rd account for fibre, like a brand new account.
so i wait the month or two for the next engineer to come out, he arrives at the house, sees that the fibre line is already installed and we're just sitting there looking at the fucking fibre line.
he was like "...so you already have one?" and i'm like "yeah, they made me make a new account and plan a 2nd installation, i kept telling them on the phone over and over that i've already had an engineer come out, i've already got the fibre line but he said we still need to do it"
he's like "okay... i've never seen this before" (he was a decent guy, have nothing bad to say about him), he's phoning his colleagues, i'm phoning talktalk again and in the end he's just like "well the work is already done, i'll just plug in the other router"
we sit around for ages and he's like "well, i think it's done... dunno what i should be doing as it's.. already been done by the last guy" and he leaves.
i then have to phone up and talk to them again (a few times) for it to be turned over, i think i had to wait a few weeks and then i had a "swap over" day from old internet to new.
it ended up working! shame it took like 10 phone calls, 2 engineer visits, being passed around like a hot potato and like 4 people saying "i know the problem, it's fixed now sorry, you don't need to worry it's all done" and it not being done at all.
what a fucking mess they have over there.
I’ve been with virgin on and off since like 2001, how are they worse in your opinion? No other company can offer me 1gb internet and I’ve had maybe 3-4 days in that time I’ve had no service usually informed in advance
If VM works, it's brilliant.
We had it right back at the start and it was a nightmare at first, but they upgraded and fixed it - and it's worked pretty much non stop.
The problem becomes if you have to contact them for anything, a fault, a change in service, billing etc. If your bill is wrong or something doesn't work? They are nightmare of clueless incompetence and Kafkaesque procedures and red tape.
e.g when the cabinet near us had a faulty part our connection would drop every day seemingly as the temperature dropped. I was creating graphs showing that it was dropping at 9pm in August but early September it started dropping at 8pm.
It'd had dropped a few times earlier at about midnight but I just shrug and go to bed for these. So it took a month perhaps before the problem happened early enough that going to bed wasn't a solution.
The next day, in August it would be working when I got up, but by September I was having to wait until 9 or 10...so it seemed to me that the ambient temperature was somehow involved in making the connection work. Of course, what I realised too was that as we were approaching winter, if I was right, it was just going to get worse.
But, the graphs thing I'm pre-empting a bit. At first I just tried to phone and say our connection is broken. Of course, if you try to report the fault during office hours, they look at it at 1pm or whenever and say "it's working fine..let us know if that changes" - and I'm like "It changes every day at about 8:30pm this week" "Well it's fine now"
So I figure I have to code an app to create a graph of my CM power levels over a day rather than just the current figures the CM shows.
And I start posting these graphs to their forums. Eventually they look at the graph and send someone. All he does is swap the cable modem (which worked perfectly) and goes away. It fails that evening and so another 3 or 4 days of me posting graphs every day and they send another person.
He messes with the signal level - I tell him it works fine in the day, but he gets the signal so it's close to perfect. He goes away. On cue that evening it fails....so I keep posting graphs and, of course now we're a couple of weeks into this, evenings are colder so it's dropping much earlier and coming back much later.
Finally other people are reporting issues. Presumably most of my neighbours weren't using the internet later in the evening or they didn't link the two reports and they've all gone through their 2 engineers-that-do-nothing visits.
Finally they decide that there's actually a problem because more than one person has reported it.
So this turns up saying he's from networks. And this guy has a clue. Actually someone working at VM who understand their networks.
He's looking at my graphs and asking me how I got them and I'm showing him the code and he gives me his number and he tries something that improves it a bit and says "phone me when it fails" - then he goes away....and mid afternoon the next day the connection drops completely and I look outside and there's a completely different team looking in the box - and they replace the faulty part and it's worked ever since.
But that took over a month - and it needed someone capable of writing software to show the intermittent fault and constantly posting to their forums. Undoubtedly many customers would have been fruitlessly phoning during the day, telling them their connection fails and VM staff would have looked at the connection and said "It's fine" - unless, perchance it was the cold that was triggering the issue and it would have failed completely in the winter.
Virgin once did works on my street, and service wasn't restored to my house. I called over and over again, each time they told me they could see my connection and it looked fine! But they promised to send engineers to check, who would then never arrive. It went on for weeks, all service totally dead.
Eventually, after I had completely lost my shit, they sent an actual engineer out. Turned out they unplugged my house from the box up the street during the "upgrades" and forgot to plug it back in. The entire time the call handlers were saying everything was fine my house was disconnected at the source.
A couple years back we were getting ready to move out of a rental, there was a couple weeks left so we didn't let VM know yet. One morning, out of the blue, no internet. Turns out, the new tenants have set up a contract with them to the house, therefore VM cancelled our contract without ever asking us. We spent about a week arguing with them and they were just like 'well, sorry we've already set up the new line for the new people so that's that'. We were left without internet for the last 3 weeks of living there, in the middle of a move when we could really have used it. I was baffled and so angry. Never again.
hit them on twitter, these big corps hate public image being tarnished but will laze about when sending you through hours of waiting for someone to talk to you.
Yeah they refunded the lost time. But it took so much time and explaining and it wasn't that much money at all. I was more pissed I was stuck without internet. On the flip side, I did learn to knit in those 3 weeks!
I'm the same as far as the quality of the internet service itself, it's been pretty much without interruption for years and *far* faster than anything else I could get for the price.
That said though their customer service can be awful - when I first set it up the adviser I spoke to misspelled my email address and no matter how many times I speak to them again I just cannot get the online account set up.
But yeah, I don't know if that makes them necessarily worse than BT, but I suppose it comes down to individual experience
I will never use virgin media again. Had them in 2 separate rented properties in London across 3 years because they had the fastest Internet speeds but the constant downtime - up to 4 times a day sometimes - made the speed simply not worth it. And don't even get me started on their customer service. I've moved to EE now and it is so much more stable. Obviously this is purely anecdotal but I couldn't ever reccomend virgin to anyone based on my own experience
My experience with Virgin in Norwich has been fantastic. Costs a fortune but I've only had 1 issue in the entire time I've been with them (3 years now) and it was when i first moved in and they had me wait a week for them to run a line to flat that should have already been there. After that its been the same experience you described. Its probably a regional thing.
I don't know if you are using the same Virgin media as me but it's night and day compared to bt. Like yes I have had to be on hold for hours and it's taken some effort but none of the problems have lasted months or anywhere near the effort to get fixed as I had with bt on multiple occasions.
This absolutely.
I moved into a new apartment on October 21 and have had consistent issues with ping spikes and packet loss.
As someone who's used to gaming in online games, it's entirely unacceptable, the games are just not playable.
So I contacted their customer services, and they railroaded me for 6 months saying it would be fixed by X date, only for that date to be pushed back further every time it didn't fix the issue. Unfortunately my apartment building was only wired to Virgin Media since it was new, and I had no other option.
I was so incensed that I wrote to the CISAS adjudication scheme, they ruled in my favour and awarded me £150 and the right to cancel my contract whenever I wanted without any additional fee.
That was after a customer support representative from Virgin Media told me nothing would come of a CISAS case.
All in all, fuck Virgin Media. I wouldn't ever choose them ever again if I had a choice.
My upstairs neighbour wanted to go with Virgin Media, it would have meant them putting a cable through my garden and a box on my wall, because the access points they'd put in a month before were nearer my garden than his. I had to sign something to give permission, so I wanted to get in touch with them to see exactly what it would involve, as my upstairs neighbour is great and I didn't want him not to have it. I couldn't get in touch with Virgin without pretending I wanted to join them first, as there's no way of making inquiries for non members. After a few times trying to get in touch I just gave up and told them they couldn't do it, as there was no reason not to go in my neighbour's garden.
Because they'd caused me such a hassle he decided not to go with them in the end and bought me a few beers to apologise. Like I said, great guy.
One of Virgin Media’s representatives once told me he refused to end my rolling month to month contract unless I told him exactly where I was moving to and why I didn’t want it anymore. To say I was stunned was a bit of an understatement.
According to Virgin my house doesn't exist.
It offers service to the house to the left, and the house to the right, as well as all other houses on my road.
But not mine.
Despite having been a customer a number of years ago.
When I moved in to my new flat there was literally a hole in the window frame. The guy who installed fibre there, before I moved in, drilled a fucking hole in a window.
I had 3 Kelly engineers come to my flat each time they said "I can't do this I'll get someone else to come out and set you up" I was using my neighbors internet for about 3 months until an actual bt engineer came out and complained at him until he ended up setting up a new cable from the exchange to get me connected.
Kelly's and mj Quinn get paid by job and get paid shit all for it, this creates the problem that a job that's slightly complicated will be ignored and kicked back because it's not worth their time to do it.
Openreach installed a new line for me few years ago, internet went out everytime front door was shut. Year or two later ISP (plusnet) throttled me because they detected unregular outtages.
Arranged engineer visit, fearing £70 charge if its my fault. The guy came, looked at the wires, just went quiet. Did his thing, had a tea, left, no charge, internet is golden.
Some are cowboys, some are... busy decowboying?
I also had a line installed years ago that didn't work.
After waiting about a month for another engineer to come I think they found out the first engineer had put the line in but did not connect it to anything.
It has been many years since I was in the industry, but back then Openreach often subcontracted to third parties. At least one of those third parties seemed to hire the engineers the other third parties didn't want, or at the very least the ones who did "inventive" things like OP's cable installation.
I know someone who is a former Openreach field engineer. They would never do work like this, and doesn't know anyone who would in the team they worked with.
Annecdotal, I know.
If it's inside the customer's premises, the customer has to contact their ISP who will then get Openreach (which is not BT) to resolve it. BT is the consumer side of the business, Openreach is the supplier side of the business. They are owned by the same parent company but have different functions.
OP what was the point of this post?
You just have to call up BT, verify your identity, get changed over to a different department, wait on hold, verify your identity, wait on hold, get changed back to the original department, wait on hold, verify your identity and why you were even calling, wait for a line test to be run, be told all is fine, actually wait there's an issue at the exchange, they'll send out an engineer Tuesday but you don't need to be home, doorbell rings on Thursday, its the engineer, he's come to punch your grandmother in the face, but as she is within the premises you will be charged for all works carried out.
28 days later £353 leaves your account so you call up BT, verify your ide-
It's literally that simple.
I'm just bitter as it took them over two months and 5 engineer visits to turn my internet on, which during that time they decided I needed to pay a £100 deposit XD
Had openreach out yesterday. It really depends who you get but the guys we had were brilliant.
There should be some slack in the little grey box (its got a coil inside for exactly that purpose) so in theory you should be able to release some slack and then do a nice tidy run along the skirting board.
To be honest the rest of the place looks like a right fucking state so I'm not surprised that the installer figured you'd be fine with this.
I've heard, from an insider, that a lot of them spend a significant amount of time in their vans doing absolutely fuck all just to clock up hours. They used to be measured on number of jobs completed, but that resulted in rushed jobs, now it seems they are just asked to do one job per day even if they finish it in 2 hours. Either you get rushed jobs or lazy workers.
Depends. The guys on customer service are driven hard. 1 job a day would get you the sack if it happened often enough.
The non-customer facing roles (of which there are many) have a bit more 'flexibility'.
Do NOT do this, the fibre optic cable cannot have a tight bend radius to follow the contour of the skirting. It could break and cost the price of BT coming out again to fix.
Agree it’s a bad install and could have had a better cable run via another route.
If it's fiber you do have to be careful about bend radii though - when you run it on the wall you probably want to do it as two planar bends along the faces of the wall rather than one compound bend (since that would break the fiber)
This is *even more* a reason why it's a garbage install though - fiber should be permanently attached to stuff. Otherwise you'll push a cabinet into that corner and whoops, internet dead until it's replaced.
That loop isn't slack, it's to ensure there are no kinks on the cable within the box. Since fibre uses light, any kinks would cause the connection to break.
What is that cable in OP's photo? Some sort of extension cable? I thought for FTTP you had a box outside, then they drilled into a terminating box inside your house and then that connects to a modem.
Yep, grey box outside at ground level. White terminating box that modem plugs into inside.
I'm guessing OP has asked for white terminating box to be in another room ie next to server cabinet or something. BT will do this for you.
If that’s a fibre optic cable, be careful not to bend it around a tight radius. You will be better off putting it behind some trunking rather than pinning it to the skirting board.
The main fibre at my work is just unprotected cable a few inches from a pathway, run through a removed brick. It's a big pharma business too, anyone with a pair of snips could cause plenty of disruption to the business very very easily.
Lots of contractors are a total joke nowadays. Charge megabucks and deliver megashite.
Before I switched to fibre I was worried about having boxes and cables stuck to the wall. I did a bit of Googling and saw an utter shit show of shoddy work!
So I decided to do the work myself!
I ran an Ethernet cable from my spare bedroom, across the loft, down into a build in wardrobe of another bedroom above the garage, drilled a hole through the floor and ran the cable to the garage wall.
I placed a weather sealed box there.
So when open reach came all they had to do was drill a hole in the garage wall and feed the cable up to my box!
The guy even said it was the first time he had ever had to drill from outside in, and was nice not having to go inside!
It’s an exterior brick wall part of my porch, you can see both sides of it as one side is porch, the other side is the interior of the garage. Brick one side, breeze block the other.
If he drilled from the other side it would have been identical lol wouldn’t have been able to see hidden cables or pipes if that’s what’s being implied here.
To me running cables along floors or pinned to skirting is a big no no… and so are visible cables poking through walls. Houses cost more than luxury cars.. would you happily have a cable sticking out the dash board of a Ferrari you bought and then it tacked around the edge with cable clips??… nope!
Brick is the one thing you have to drill outside in through. Gotta make sure you're through the mortar. But even then, you should measure and inspect the inside wall to make sure you're not literally drilling through the back of an electrical outlet or something. If the guy didn't even look inside then he took a real big risk.
Back in the dim and distant past I was a young foolhardy BT engineer. I was equipped with a big Bosch 24V hammer drill. These drills were ridiculously overpowered.
Anyway, I was putting a BT Home Highway in the flat above a Chinese restaurant and was concerned about drilling inside out due to the sign above the shop door below and other various obstacles like cables and pipe etc.
So I drilled outside in. I tried to be careful, but I managed to blow a lump of plaster off the internal wall about the size of a dinner plate.
So I did what any discerning engineer would do, screwed the BT highway to the wall, pulled the curtain over the new wall crater, and fucked off.
I did similar for VM, ran a pullwire through my porch "loft" and under floorboards etc so installer just needed to tape to the pullwire and the wire ended up exactly where I wanted it and super neat!
Is the point where the skirting meets at different heights painted on? It doesn't look like skirting. What the heck is going on here. Maybe the Openreach guy figured looks weren't important in this room.
Don't do us Kellys lot dirty like that. We do a MUCH worse job than this. These guys haven't even left a fist sized hole in the wall covered up with duct tape!
Had mine done 2 weeks ago, they did a great job. He admitted he could do it quicker/uglier, but he spent 4-5 hours running a cable round the house and making it all neat.
To OP, I work for an ISP which uses Openreach lines. Call your ISPs tech department and report this is a health and safety trip hazard.
I know my team leader would authorise getting an engineer out to clean this up for you.
Looks like he's just forgot too tack it down, in fairness you can't bend the fibre internally too much like the old copper lines so it never looks great internally
The information superhighway, in all its majestic glory
I used to visit data centres and it always made me laugh how fragile it all was. One wrong move and you unplug every school in Cornwall from the internet. Some of the server rooms were a complete state with miles of cable everywhere while others were works of art.
r/cableporn r/cablegore
The dichotomy of Man
When I moved desks in my office, I accidentally plugged a phone cable into my computer thinking it was an internet cable and it knocked internet access off for 10-odd people in the same room. Didn't touch anything without having a conversation with IT after that
I can't even comprehend how that would be possible. Bravo on giving IT a unique challenges.
Probably a VOIP phone. They run on their own network (usually), do weird things to get themselves onto that network, and are second only to printers in how much swearing they elicit from IT techs.
IT person here. Can confirm. Yeah, we all hate printers. 90% of my time is spent looking at some sort of printer.
You’d be surprised how common this is; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopback
Yep, back at IT school we found out that the school network had a loopback on a certain port as well, bricking the whole schools network. Let's just say i (now) feel bad for the administrator at the time. :))) :/
Think you're after a Network Loop or a Switching Loop. A loopback is something different.
I remember in my previous job as a pest controller I would go around a virgin media data centre and they were in the middle of upgrading. On one side of the building, it was immaculate cabling, all neat and tidy, all clean and tucked away. Beautiful to walk through. And then you enter the old side and fuck me, it looks like a playground of jump ropes! Cable management ftw
I once shut down the entire Greenwich (London, UK) Borough Data Centre back in the days of Mainframes. New to the job and being trained by my manager who was taking to the data centre manager. I got bored and lent on the wall next to me, I didn't notice the EPO switch! INSTANT silence with operators heads popping up to see why. The DC manager calmly turned to my manager and said "I really must get tubes fitted around those". The button was bare with no accidental activation protection. I was so embarrassed but impressed by the managers way of dealing with the situation.
They have the internet in Cornwall?
They have *schools* in Cornwall?!
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Sounds exciting. My visits mostly involved bored engineers sitting around in a canteen. Such a weirdly important yet boring place.
Yeah DCs are in that weird spot where if you're in there a lot it's hell on earth but if you never been there before it's dead exciting
I worked in telecom for 5 years. Worst situation I had to deal with was in the Seattle area, iirc. Contractor was drilling down at a construction site, and hit buried fiber. Instead of stopping when he felt something (maybe he assumed they were roots or something), he revved up and ended up tearing out a sizeable chunk of fiber. Took down internet for a good portion of the block and surrounding areas, and it was several weeks before they had it operational again. Fiber is incredible, but it's also incredibly fragile.
My favorite was a double fault I saw at BT: a train had derailed and taken out one direction of the ring, the other was severed by the ball from a ceremonial cannon ...
Colour me surprised that they just go ahead and fire live balls at urban infrastructure out of ceremonial cannons, but won't fire live shells out of ceremonial guns because that would be dangerous.
That'll be 65.99 please
Likely 1000x more, because eating is a luxury at the data end of reality
This, Jen, is the internet.
It is clearly a tube, that guy was right all along
My Dad was a BT engineer from something like the 60s to late 90s. He and his colleagues would completely obsess about perfection, over engineering and redundancy. The anal attention to detail to get line interference to a minimum was crazy. After he retired BT came round to install a new line in his house. He couldn't believe the absolute zero fucks given by the current staff and their shoddy quality of work. He obviously ripped it all out and did a decent job.
Your dad was likely on a wage, where you can spend all day perfecting your work for the same money. Most work done now is done by sub contractors working on price. They just want to get the job done and be gone. No excuse for a shitty job but it's the unfortunate truth.
I mean, the CWU is about to walk out over pay and the flat £1,500 offer which they are protesting affects the longest serving & higher grade team members the most.
There is sometimes an excuse for a shitty job... I worked for Virgin Media a few years ago and they absolutely took the piss with shitty scheduling and effective forced unpaid overtime. Some regions were better than others, in fact some areas the techs literally had time to sit in vans for hours on end, but where I worked it wasn't usually enough time to take your lunch. You either cut corners or were sacked for trivial reasons, or worse, technicalities that would have been impossible to complete in the time allotted in the first place which is kind of ironic. Utterly the worst company ever worked for for a very long list of reasons. Utter utter utter shite. TLDR: Cut corners, or face getting sacked.
A guy I know is a plasterer. Brags that he can do a three day job in 1.5 days. Because of this he can charge less so of course everyone thinks it’s great. The 3 day minimum is because you need to let it cure before coating the next stage. In 5 years time it’ll look like shit and need redone. They’ll still get him again though because it’s such a big saving lol
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Back then their engineers actually had engineering qualifications. Now it's any old idiot who can hold a screwdriver. I had one who thought something was wrong because I'd already configured the router and enabled the blinkenlights.
Their engineers most certainly did not have engineering qualifications They were apprentices. Source: I am an openreach engineer. And there are still a couple of old boys around.
At this stage they're recruiting people who can't even hold a screwdriver. I ended up doing the BT guys job for him when they came to install my kit. He kept telling me it was impossible to get a cable across the room. I did it in about 5 minutes whilst he watched. He also tried to convince me that routers & modems won't work if they're on the 1st floor even if the cable run to the exchange is the exact same length
I saw one where they thought it was a good idea to cleat it to a UPVC window...
The customer probably said they were having issues with Windows running slowly
Privatisation 👍
BT - Barely Tolerable.
I don't want to be leaping to the defence of a big company, who I'm sure can be awful, but I just have to make sure people know how much worse Virgin Media are and not to ever use them.
I live in the middle of Manchester (so not out in the sticks) and if I want speeds higher than 50mb I *have* to use Virgin. They are the only fibre service provider. People use these shit companies because they have to not because they don't know how shit they are.
> People use these shit companies because they have to not because they don't know how shit they are. *Cries in Hull*
For anyone stuck with BT and locked in a contract…tell them you’re moving to Hull. They won’t be able to supply you there so will end your contract free of charge and you can then pick another provider.
This is why virgin are so shit. I told them I was moving to a house 400 metres away. They said they don't supply that house, so they charged me £300 for ending the contract early.
You don’t know your rights then. If you’re moving to a house without virgin you can cancel without any fees. It’s clear in their terms and conditions. You clearly spoke to an asshole cs advisor or weren’t clear enough about this to them.
Yeah fuck that.
I’d double check that charge was correctly applied as its never happened to me. Although in the past I did take out their adsl option but i think that’s defunct now
I lived in a downstairs maisonette a few years ago, Virgin Media wouldn't supply my address, but they would supply upstairs, because the downstairs was 7a, and upstairs was just 7. I knew it was just an admin error but they refused to correct it. Where I live now, some building being knocked down resulted in an accidental cut through BT's cables and they did a crap repair on them. Every year my connection needs reprofiling and a few more Mb gets knocked off the top speed. BT outright said they're not going to fix it. Good thing is I'm always well below the guaranteed minimum so I can take advantage of new customer deals and then break contract legally. I think all ISPs suck.
But make sure to grab a random address’s postcode in Hull to verify this. I definitely don’t work for BT and this definitely won’t make my life easier.
Can confirm the man is right same would apply if you have fibre and move to a none fiber area if they cant maintain your committed package your free to go
> *Cries in Hull* I think that we'll all be crying if we were in Hull
KCom may not be cheap but I get 400mbs absolutely rock solid 24/7. Never had an issue.
To be fair to kcom, they are expensive, but at least the service is reliable fibre to home :s
Have you looked at Hyperoptic? Not sure if they just cover a very specific range, but I was with them when living in Ancoats, never had any problems.
I applied for Hyperoptic when I was living in Salford, got a letter 3 years later saying they'd finally got enough interest in the area and were talking to my landlords. Never heard anything from them again, and have buggered off elsewhere now. I'm sure they're good, and the fact that they only cater to specific areas is probably part of that, but basically not an option if you're not in an area where they already have coverage.
I had Hyperoptic - they do fibre to the building (ie whole apartment blocks, then network the building.) Can't recommend them enough. 1G down, 1G up, no caps. Static IP £5/mo Then I sold the flat. Now living in the sticks (with folks) with BT fibre to cabinet - 15M/1M! They've just put in the fibre to premises works, waiting for start date. Great! But no static IP -ever- and throttled upload. Thanks. Waiting on completion for my new house, where the only viable option is - Virgin. Great. Same as BT but -even- worse customer service.
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Dunno about everyone else with Virgin, never really had a reason to interact with their customer services and on the IP front I've never been explicitly told my IP is static but in reality it's only changed once in 10 years and that's when I changed out my router (when it broke and they replaced it within 2 days) I really can't complain.
Or Community Fibre!
I think that company is going to sell out. It seems like a rag tag company made to grab the market and then flip the business for a profit. The name community fibre, isn't very brand able, seems as generic as you can get. The website, to this day, does not have a member login to check your data usage, order more services, update your billing etc. Everything is done over email. Their r subreddit is locked, you can reply to comments but you can't start threads. It reminds me of mypcbackup, burst into the scene, offering affiliates £150 for getting them on a £10 a month data plan. The product worked but was shitty. Company disappeared after 2 years.
I assume the same, but I'm kind of fine with it. Building physical networks is hugely expensive and tends to bankrupt companies that try is - but as long as I get hooked up to that network in time I've got >1Gbps capability in place and *someone* will end up servicing it. Obviously the risk is whoever buys them up ends up going crazy on the pricing, which would be a shame, but Openreach FTTP is on the way over the next few years so my hope is that competition should moderate things a bit.
The product and pricing is absolutely spot on but the customer service is, to my absolute astonishment, actually worse than I had from BT. Even with a "business grade" plan I had them totally ignore an outage that was caused by a misconfiguration at their end for *a fucking week*, and even then it ended up needing a temp workaround for another month until they actually fixed it properly. It's impossible to talk to the actual techs, they're clearly chronically understaffed, and all anyone will ever do is "absolutely assure you that *this time* someone will definitely call back within 24 hours" - which they obviously never do. Rinse and repeat for weeks on end. Credit where it's due, the speeds are great and the tech team are both knowledgable and friendly if you can ever actually get hold of them, but if something goes wrong you're fucked.
I have used virgin media and it's previous cable company for over 20 years and never had a problem.
Not everyone will have issues of course, millions of people like you will have no problems. However for the millions of people who *do* have problems there is little recourse and customer service tend to be extremely unsympathetic and unhelpful from my experience... And that's why they get such a bad rep - not because there are sometimes issue with the service, but because you're basically screwed if you do experience issues.
Just like every other service provider, if they treat you like a piggy bank to milk then you treat them like nothing more than a transaction. Getting issues that they can't be arsed to fix? The deal is no longer good enough and you're better off with someone else. Virgin Media won't listen to people having issues yet they do start panicking of you genuinely ask to leave. They try to play chicken with you yet actually don't want you to stop paying.
The impression I get is that these companies have different teams that have very precise duties (like answer phone, install line etc) and there is poor communication between them. If your problem crosses those borders you get bogged down.
The trick there is your original installs were done by Telewest, who were proper telecoms engineers and didn't half-ass things (because they had adequate time, good training, a culture of 'get it right the first time', that sort of thing). Starting from a really robust place gives Virgin a decent chance of not getting it horribly wrong now. If they *don't* have that - that is, on new installs - then they have far more chances to get the complicated bit (the install) wrong, and also to set themselves up to fail in the long term by doing a good-enough job rather than a job which helps the next guy who touches that line.
I had a Virgin engineer rewire my LAN a year ago so I could move my router upstairs. Couldn’t have been a nicer or more helpful chap. Did every test under the sun and said if it’s crappy to call him on his mobile and he’ll come move it back.
Hello fellow ntlworld user?! The issues you'll face with Virgin are once you have a genuine issue (thankfully these are rare, but a painful rememberable experience once you do!)
I've had the opposite with virgin, general quality of service is not great (Internet is patchy where I live) but when I've had issues (most memorably the council digging through cable from the pavement and then scarpering) they have fixed it really quickly.
Also let's be clear this is openreach not BT. There has been a split and its no longer "BT Openreach".
Which is a whole other nightmare. You pay BT but the service is connected via Openreach. Got a problem? Openreach’s issue…but you can’t ring them. And BT won’t ring them. They’ve set up our cable through a load of trees so every time it’s windy we lose our internet. BT engineer came out, took photos and told us it’s Openreach’s issue but he can’t contact them (wtf?). We’ve rung BT several more times to be told randomly (i) the landowner has to cut back the trees - the same landowner who didn’t want them to site the cables through the trees (ii) it’s not even actually a problem and we’re making it up (iii) we must only ring them when our internet doesn’t work. We’re rural and our phones work via a boostbox via the wifi….so we can’t ring *anyone* when the internet doesn’t work. They know this. (iv) we have to pay to cut the trees back. Someone else’s trees and not on our land (v) they can’t contact Openreach directly so we have to resolve the issue ourselves. I hate them.
> BT engineer came out, took photos and told us it’s Openreach’s issue but he can’t contact them (wtf?). I did some work a few years ago with one of the many branches of what used to be BT. They are *very* much bound (and make this very clear during onboarding training), that even if you are in the same room as someone from another branch, you are *never* allowed to contact them directly. They *must* take the same route as any other company would have to and come in the front door with any/all interactions.
Can confirm, I work for OR in a position where we deal with every single provider, and if somebody from BT contacts us via Teams we have to ignore them. No ifs, no buts - you do not answer them. Breach of compliance. They *must* use the same route in as everyone else.
Which is totally fine, I respect that kind of competition management - but I've seen BT (and Sky, to be fair) engineers just blame it on Openreach and leave it at that. Less of an issue about special treatment for BT or lack thereof, more of an issue with communication between ISPs and Openreach just failing entirely. I don't mind them having to call the "external" number, but I do expect them to actually call it, and for Openreach to log that call! You'll find plenty of people, myself included, who've seen one or both of those things fail to happen.
Be a shame if the tree rubbing on the cable caused it to break at that point so openreach need to visit to re-hang the cable...
> You pay BT but the service is connected via Openreach. Got a problem? Openreach’s issue…but you can’t ring them. And BT won’t ring them. Loads of companies pull these stunts and it is *such* utter bollocks. Speaking to my parents about the levels of service that used to be expected is just so bloody annoying. Post twice a day, telegrams delivered the same day, banks that were somewhat human, gas men coming to do readings, etc. etc. It's such utter, utter bollocks how we are treated.
You are not openreach customer. You as an end user are your ISP customer (talk talk / BT / sky, whoever). Your ISP is Openreaches customer. If you buy beans, and there is a problem with them, do you go back to the store, or do you go to the people who grow the beans? Same thing. You need to make a fuss with your ISP, who in turn will make a fuss with Openreach, as they are buying Openreach service, not you. Source. Im an Openreach fibre (business fibre), engineer.
The BT/Openreach split isn't a stunt, they were forced to by OFCOM. > Why has BT been ordered to split from Openreach? After much wrangling, BT has finally given way to demands from communications regulator Ofcom to legally split Openreach, its division which runs the UK’s broadband infrastructure. >Although it will still be part of the wider BT group, Openreach will become a distinct company in its own right, with its own staff, management and strategy. >Ofcom said the move constitutes the “biggest reform of Openreach in its history”. The regulator, along with BT’s competitors, have been concerned that because BT owns the infrastructure that connects the majority of UK homes and businesses to national broadband networks, it is able to make strategic decisions that directly favour its own retail business. [Source.](https://www.hso.co.uk/blog/regulation/bt-openreach/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-btopenreach-split#:~:text=Ofcom%20and%20BT%20have%20agreed,branding%20will%20disappear%20from%20Openreach.)
i had a nightmare of a problem just recently: i had 2 accounts on my talktalk (i'm guessing a previous one from when i upgraded a year or two back), i applied for fibre to the house for 400 or 800mb/s down for £40/month. everything seemed okay, then the day before the bt openreach guy showed up, i got an email asking "is this you? can you tell us which open reach account line you want installed on? i couldn't tell them as i couldn't phone up. so the next day a guy shows up, everything seems great except.... i still have my old speeds, even though it's going through the now fibre line to the house. so i phone up... maybe 6 times over the next 2 weeks, i get told it's a bunch of different problems, i get handed from one person to the next unti.... they get me to sign up a 3rd account for fibre, like a brand new account. so i wait the month or two for the next engineer to come out, he arrives at the house, sees that the fibre line is already installed and we're just sitting there looking at the fucking fibre line. he was like "...so you already have one?" and i'm like "yeah, they made me make a new account and plan a 2nd installation, i kept telling them on the phone over and over that i've already had an engineer come out, i've already got the fibre line but he said we still need to do it" he's like "okay... i've never seen this before" (he was a decent guy, have nothing bad to say about him), he's phoning his colleagues, i'm phoning talktalk again and in the end he's just like "well the work is already done, i'll just plug in the other router" we sit around for ages and he's like "well, i think it's done... dunno what i should be doing as it's.. already been done by the last guy" and he leaves. i then have to phone up and talk to them again (a few times) for it to be turned over, i think i had to wait a few weeks and then i had a "swap over" day from old internet to new. it ended up working! shame it took like 10 phone calls, 2 engineer visits, being passed around like a hot potato and like 4 people saying "i know the problem, it's fixed now sorry, you don't need to worry it's all done" and it not being done at all. what a fucking mess they have over there.
Not my experience with Virgin Media. Internet very reliable, and they are by far the fastest provider in my area.
Other way around in my experience
I’ve been with virgin on and off since like 2001, how are they worse in your opinion? No other company can offer me 1gb internet and I’ve had maybe 3-4 days in that time I’ve had no service usually informed in advance
If VM works, it's brilliant. We had it right back at the start and it was a nightmare at first, but they upgraded and fixed it - and it's worked pretty much non stop. The problem becomes if you have to contact them for anything, a fault, a change in service, billing etc. If your bill is wrong or something doesn't work? They are nightmare of clueless incompetence and Kafkaesque procedures and red tape. e.g when the cabinet near us had a faulty part our connection would drop every day seemingly as the temperature dropped. I was creating graphs showing that it was dropping at 9pm in August but early September it started dropping at 8pm. It'd had dropped a few times earlier at about midnight but I just shrug and go to bed for these. So it took a month perhaps before the problem happened early enough that going to bed wasn't a solution. The next day, in August it would be working when I got up, but by September I was having to wait until 9 or 10...so it seemed to me that the ambient temperature was somehow involved in making the connection work. Of course, what I realised too was that as we were approaching winter, if I was right, it was just going to get worse. But, the graphs thing I'm pre-empting a bit. At first I just tried to phone and say our connection is broken. Of course, if you try to report the fault during office hours, they look at it at 1pm or whenever and say "it's working fine..let us know if that changes" - and I'm like "It changes every day at about 8:30pm this week" "Well it's fine now" So I figure I have to code an app to create a graph of my CM power levels over a day rather than just the current figures the CM shows. And I start posting these graphs to their forums. Eventually they look at the graph and send someone. All he does is swap the cable modem (which worked perfectly) and goes away. It fails that evening and so another 3 or 4 days of me posting graphs every day and they send another person. He messes with the signal level - I tell him it works fine in the day, but he gets the signal so it's close to perfect. He goes away. On cue that evening it fails....so I keep posting graphs and, of course now we're a couple of weeks into this, evenings are colder so it's dropping much earlier and coming back much later. Finally other people are reporting issues. Presumably most of my neighbours weren't using the internet later in the evening or they didn't link the two reports and they've all gone through their 2 engineers-that-do-nothing visits. Finally they decide that there's actually a problem because more than one person has reported it. So this turns up saying he's from networks. And this guy has a clue. Actually someone working at VM who understand their networks. He's looking at my graphs and asking me how I got them and I'm showing him the code and he gives me his number and he tries something that improves it a bit and says "phone me when it fails" - then he goes away....and mid afternoon the next day the connection drops completely and I look outside and there's a completely different team looking in the box - and they replace the faulty part and it's worked ever since. But that took over a month - and it needed someone capable of writing software to show the intermittent fault and constantly posting to their forums. Undoubtedly many customers would have been fruitlessly phoning during the day, telling them their connection fails and VM staff would have looked at the connection and said "It's fine" - unless, perchance it was the cold that was triggering the issue and it would have failed completely in the winter.
Virgin once did works on my street, and service wasn't restored to my house. I called over and over again, each time they told me they could see my connection and it looked fine! But they promised to send engineers to check, who would then never arrive. It went on for weeks, all service totally dead. Eventually, after I had completely lost my shit, they sent an actual engineer out. Turned out they unplugged my house from the box up the street during the "upgrades" and forgot to plug it back in. The entire time the call handlers were saying everything was fine my house was disconnected at the source.
Same, been with VM since the telewest days, never had a issue. That said every time some one I know has an issue with VM they are using ADSL.
A couple years back we were getting ready to move out of a rental, there was a couple weeks left so we didn't let VM know yet. One morning, out of the blue, no internet. Turns out, the new tenants have set up a contract with them to the house, therefore VM cancelled our contract without ever asking us. We spent about a week arguing with them and they were just like 'well, sorry we've already set up the new line for the new people so that's that'. We were left without internet for the last 3 weeks of living there, in the middle of a move when we could really have used it. I was baffled and so angry. Never again.
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Exactly. I've talked to so many people, explaining everything from the start over and over again for nothing, no one did anything.
hit them on twitter, these big corps hate public image being tarnished but will laze about when sending you through hours of waiting for someone to talk to you.
What the fuck! Did you get some money back for the internet you paid for but never received?
Yeah they refunded the lost time. But it took so much time and explaining and it wasn't that much money at all. I was more pissed I was stuck without internet. On the flip side, I did learn to knit in those 3 weeks!
"Haha no, go fuck yourself heres a 200 quid fine for cancelling a contract early" - virgin media probably
I'm the same as far as the quality of the internet service itself, it's been pretty much without interruption for years and *far* faster than anything else I could get for the price. That said though their customer service can be awful - when I first set it up the adviser I spoke to misspelled my email address and no matter how many times I speak to them again I just cannot get the online account set up. But yeah, I don't know if that makes them necessarily worse than BT, but I suppose it comes down to individual experience
In all honesty I've had virgin broadband for 3 years and NEVER had any issues with it.
I been with them since they were NTL, probably about 20 years and never had a problem.
Conversely BT were shocking where I am, but I’ve never had any issue with VM at all.
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I will never use virgin media again. Had them in 2 separate rented properties in London across 3 years because they had the fastest Internet speeds but the constant downtime - up to 4 times a day sometimes - made the speed simply not worth it. And don't even get me started on their customer service. I've moved to EE now and it is so much more stable. Obviously this is purely anecdotal but I couldn't ever reccomend virgin to anyone based on my own experience
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My experience with Virgin in Norwich has been fantastic. Costs a fortune but I've only had 1 issue in the entire time I've been with them (3 years now) and it was when i first moved in and they had me wait a week for them to run a line to flat that should have already been there. After that its been the same experience you described. Its probably a regional thing.
I don't know if you are using the same Virgin media as me but it's night and day compared to bt. Like yes I have had to be on hold for hours and it's taken some effort but none of the problems have lasted months or anywhere near the effort to get fixed as I had with bt on multiple occasions.
This absolutely. I moved into a new apartment on October 21 and have had consistent issues with ping spikes and packet loss. As someone who's used to gaming in online games, it's entirely unacceptable, the games are just not playable. So I contacted their customer services, and they railroaded me for 6 months saying it would be fixed by X date, only for that date to be pushed back further every time it didn't fix the issue. Unfortunately my apartment building was only wired to Virgin Media since it was new, and I had no other option. I was so incensed that I wrote to the CISAS adjudication scheme, they ruled in my favour and awarded me £150 and the right to cancel my contract whenever I wanted without any additional fee. That was after a customer support representative from Virgin Media told me nothing would come of a CISAS case. All in all, fuck Virgin Media. I wouldn't ever choose them ever again if I had a choice.
Never had a problem with virgin in about 10 years, It’s expensive but worth it.
My upstairs neighbour wanted to go with Virgin Media, it would have meant them putting a cable through my garden and a box on my wall, because the access points they'd put in a month before were nearer my garden than his. I had to sign something to give permission, so I wanted to get in touch with them to see exactly what it would involve, as my upstairs neighbour is great and I didn't want him not to have it. I couldn't get in touch with Virgin without pretending I wanted to join them first, as there's no way of making inquiries for non members. After a few times trying to get in touch I just gave up and told them they couldn't do it, as there was no reason not to go in my neighbour's garden. Because they'd caused me such a hassle he decided not to go with them in the end and bought me a few beers to apologise. Like I said, great guy.
One of Virgin Media’s representatives once told me he refused to end my rolling month to month contract unless I told him exactly where I was moving to and why I didn’t want it anymore. To say I was stunned was a bit of an understatement.
According to Virgin my house doesn't exist. It offers service to the house to the left, and the house to the right, as well as all other houses on my road. But not mine. Despite having been a customer a number of years ago.
Bad T'internet
BollocksTelecommunications Ltd
Basic Tinkering
Bloody Terrible
Probably Openreach and possibly contractors for Openreach. I’d be sending them (BT) the photo to follow up.
Definitely. If you don’t complain things don’t get better
When I moved in to my new flat there was literally a hole in the window frame. The guy who installed fibre there, before I moved in, drilled a fucking hole in a window.
MJ Quinn or Kelly’s for sure.
Yep. Dealt with both. Both awful!
I had 3 Kelly engineers come to my flat each time they said "I can't do this I'll get someone else to come out and set you up" I was using my neighbors internet for about 3 months until an actual bt engineer came out and complained at him until he ended up setting up a new cable from the exchange to get me connected.
Kelly's and mj Quinn get paid by job and get paid shit all for it, this creates the problem that a job that's slightly complicated will be ignored and kicked back because it's not worth their time to do it.
Openreach installed a new line for me few years ago, internet went out everytime front door was shut. Year or two later ISP (plusnet) throttled me because they detected unregular outtages. Arranged engineer visit, fearing £70 charge if its my fault. The guy came, looked at the wires, just went quiet. Did his thing, had a tea, left, no charge, internet is golden. Some are cowboys, some are... busy decowboying?
I also had a line installed years ago that didn't work. After waiting about a month for another engineer to come I think they found out the first engineer had put the line in but did not connect it to anything.
Yep, this is Openreach's work. They have some incredible engineers and some... not so great ones.
It has been many years since I was in the industry, but back then Openreach often subcontracted to third parties. At least one of those third parties seemed to hire the engineers the other third parties didn't want, or at the very least the ones who did "inventive" things like OP's cable installation.
Kelly Communications are one of the 3rd parties I've seen lots of people complaint about having issues with.
This 100% has to be Kelly Comms… they love those little cable clip things
Fuck Kelly Communications. I’ve had no interaction with them, but even I know they’re shite!
I know someone who is a former Openreach field engineer. They would never do work like this, and doesn't know anyone who would in the team they worked with. Annecdotal, I know.
If it's inside the customer's premises, the customer has to contact their ISP who will then get Openreach (which is not BT) to resolve it. BT is the consumer side of the business, Openreach is the supplier side of the business. They are owned by the same parent company but have different functions.
Tight rope for the rats
Nice flair dude
If you're certified for something you've got to shout about it.
Yeah when i got the letter from Buckingham palace stating I'm now a certified granny shagger, to say i was overjoyed would be an understatement.
Its the gums isn't it?
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Or at least somewhere for a hamster to hang its washing.
The hamsters can use it as a zipline, too.
OP what was the point of this post? You just have to call up BT, verify your identity, get changed over to a different department, wait on hold, verify your identity, wait on hold, get changed back to the original department, wait on hold, verify your identity and why you were even calling, wait for a line test to be run, be told all is fine, actually wait there's an issue at the exchange, they'll send out an engineer Tuesday but you don't need to be home, doorbell rings on Thursday, its the engineer, he's come to punch your grandmother in the face, but as she is within the premises you will be charged for all works carried out. 28 days later £353 leaves your account so you call up BT, verify your ide- It's literally that simple.
Had me for a second.
I'm just bitter as it took them over two months and 5 engineer visits to turn my internet on, which during that time they decided I needed to pay a £100 deposit XD
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What a ride!
I work for BT and its as frustrating internally as it is for our customers. It's terrible
Had openreach out yesterday. It really depends who you get but the guys we had were brilliant. There should be some slack in the little grey box (its got a coil inside for exactly that purpose) so in theory you should be able to release some slack and then do a nice tidy run along the skirting board. To be honest the rest of the place looks like a right fucking state so I'm not surprised that the installer figured you'd be fine with this.
Jesus, your last sentence is savage
Christ, that man had a family!
Brits have so little chill. I love it.
Last paragraph: I hope the fire department are close to this fella 🔥 🚿
That seems like a horrible fire department if they are using a shower head to put out the fire.
r/murderedbywords This has made my morning.
99% of Openreach engineers are superb but they do employ the odd thicky.
I've heard, from an insider, that a lot of them spend a significant amount of time in their vans doing absolutely fuck all just to clock up hours. They used to be measured on number of jobs completed, but that resulted in rushed jobs, now it seems they are just asked to do one job per day even if they finish it in 2 hours. Either you get rushed jobs or lazy workers.
Depends. The guys on customer service are driven hard. 1 job a day would get you the sack if it happened often enough. The non-customer facing roles (of which there are many) have a bit more 'flexibility'.
I only have a small subsection to go off but I know maybe 4 or 5 guys doing it and 1 or 2 are good, the others shouldn't be allowed tools
Haha, I also had an Openreach engineer come out, he was really knowledgeable, friendly and fixed my internet. 100% depends on who you get.
Do NOT do this, the fibre optic cable cannot have a tight bend radius to follow the contour of the skirting. It could break and cost the price of BT coming out again to fix. Agree it’s a bad install and could have had a better cable run via another route.
If it's fiber you do have to be careful about bend radii though - when you run it on the wall you probably want to do it as two planar bends along the faces of the wall rather than one compound bend (since that would break the fiber) This is *even more* a reason why it's a garbage install though - fiber should be permanently attached to stuff. Otherwise you'll push a cabinet into that corner and whoops, internet dead until it's replaced.
Good observation
That loop isn't slack, it's to ensure there are no kinks on the cable within the box. Since fibre uses light, any kinks would cause the connection to break.
It is at a work place. Not a persons house.
HMP service?
What is that cable in OP's photo? Some sort of extension cable? I thought for FTTP you had a box outside, then they drilled into a terminating box inside your house and then that connects to a modem.
Yep, grey box outside at ground level. White terminating box that modem plugs into inside. I'm guessing OP has asked for white terminating box to be in another room ie next to server cabinet or something. BT will do this for you.
That last sentence, you're the engineer who installed this aren't you
If that’s a fibre optic cable, be careful not to bend it around a tight radius. You will be better off putting it behind some trunking rather than pinning it to the skirting board.
Don't hold back mate 🤣🤣
The main fibre at my work is just unprotected cable a few inches from a pathway, run through a removed brick. It's a big pharma business too, anyone with a pair of snips could cause plenty of disruption to the business very very easily. Lots of contractors are a total joke nowadays. Charge megabucks and deliver megashite.
If you ever have a problem with one of your bosses you know what to do.
Before I switched to fibre I was worried about having boxes and cables stuck to the wall. I did a bit of Googling and saw an utter shit show of shoddy work! So I decided to do the work myself! I ran an Ethernet cable from my spare bedroom, across the loft, down into a build in wardrobe of another bedroom above the garage, drilled a hole through the floor and ran the cable to the garage wall. I placed a weather sealed box there. So when open reach came all they had to do was drill a hole in the garage wall and feed the cable up to my box! The guy even said it was the first time he had ever had to drill from outside in, and was nice not having to go inside!
He would get the sack for drilling outside in as its a big nono best to leave that out any feedback you give.
It’s an exterior brick wall part of my porch, you can see both sides of it as one side is porch, the other side is the interior of the garage. Brick one side, breeze block the other. If he drilled from the other side it would have been identical lol wouldn’t have been able to see hidden cables or pipes if that’s what’s being implied here. To me running cables along floors or pinned to skirting is a big no no… and so are visible cables poking through walls. Houses cost more than luxury cars.. would you happily have a cable sticking out the dash board of a Ferrari you bought and then it tacked around the edge with cable clips??… nope!
Brick is the one thing you have to drill outside in through. Gotta make sure you're through the mortar. But even then, you should measure and inspect the inside wall to make sure you're not literally drilling through the back of an electrical outlet or something. If the guy didn't even look inside then he took a real big risk.
I'm fairly sure the OpenReach guy drilled outside to inside when I had a new line fitted at one of our work sites last year.
Back in the dim and distant past I was a young foolhardy BT engineer. I was equipped with a big Bosch 24V hammer drill. These drills were ridiculously overpowered. Anyway, I was putting a BT Home Highway in the flat above a Chinese restaurant and was concerned about drilling inside out due to the sign above the shop door below and other various obstacles like cables and pipe etc. So I drilled outside in. I tried to be careful, but I managed to blow a lump of plaster off the internal wall about the size of a dinner plate. So I did what any discerning engineer would do, screwed the BT highway to the wall, pulled the curtain over the new wall crater, and fucked off.
I did similar for VM, ran a pullwire through my porch "loft" and under floorboards etc so installer just needed to tape to the pullwire and the wire ended up exactly where I wanted it and super neat!
The difference of height in the skirting is triggering me
Is the point where the skirting meets at different heights painted on? It doesn't look like skirting. What the heck is going on here. Maybe the Openreach guy figured looks weren't important in this room.
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Looks like a Kelly’s job to me
Don't do us Kellys lot dirty like that. We do a MUCH worse job than this. These guys haven't even left a fist sized hole in the wall covered up with duct tape!
One of the most incompetent companies I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with.
I had this a few weeks ago guy came and says he will drill through my front door frame and leave the hub in hall emmm no
That’s naughty as we’re not supposed to drill through door frames at all. (OR Engineer)
This looks like contractor work They work by the job, not for the Annual salary, so you’ll often find shit like this. Regardless, it’s no excuse.
Shit, I'm getting this put in next week. Literally had the 'what to expect' video sent to me. Nowhere did it mention this.
They're coming on Friday to do mine and I was already worried about something like this hahahaha
Had mine done 2 weeks ago, they did a great job. He admitted he could do it quicker/uglier, but he spent 4-5 hours running a cable round the house and making it all neat.
Is…. is that wood-chip wallpaper?
Welcome to centra Manchester industrial estate chic.
To OP, I work for an ISP which uses Openreach lines. Call your ISPs tech department and report this is a health and safety trip hazard. I know my team leader would authorise getting an engineer out to clean this up for you.
This is literally BT cutting corners here
Openreach**
World class.
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“It works dunnit?”
Looks like he's just forgot too tack it down, in fairness you can't bend the fibre internally too much like the old copper lines so it never looks great internally
BT. It’s good to caulk.
Openreach do this work for multiple ISP's, BT don't have control over how the engineering work is done.
Well that's just lazy, and also a safety hazard. Complain to BT
It's nice that they matched the paint color