At 2.00am yesterday morning the internal bell of our monitored burglar alarm began ringing. Sue and I were instantly awake, and in a matter of seconds I had gone downstairs to check why the alarm was sounding. The display was showing a handset symbol, which indicated that our landline connection was no longer functioning. I was able to reset the alarm, and went back to bed.
When I got up at 8.00am, I checked the landline and discovered that it was still not working. I checked that the handset was not at fault, and then tried to contact our service provider, Virgin Media. This proved somewhat difficult as they were experiencing a service outage across most of the south-east of England. (Sue discovered this when she attempted to contact P&O online about a forthcoming cruise, and was informed that their service provider – Virgin Media – was ‘experiencing difficulties’.)
At 5.15pm I finally managed to access the service test page on Virgin Media’s website. This enabled me to test our landline connection ... which appeared not to be faulty. I have therefore booked an engineer call, and they should be arriving between 4.00pm and 7.00pm today to sort the problem out.
We had the same problem in April last year, and they traced it back to the box where the incoming cable enters our house. On that occasion the engineer checked the connections and resealed the box ... and told us that it ought to be replaced.
It hasn’t been ... and I’ll be more than a little unhappy if the faulty box is the cause of the problem.
When I got up at 8.00am, I checked the landline and discovered that it was still not working. I checked that the handset was not at fault, and then tried to contact our service provider, Virgin Media. This proved somewhat difficult as they were experiencing a service outage across most of the south-east of England. (Sue discovered this when she attempted to contact P&O online about a forthcoming cruise, and was informed that their service provider – Virgin Media – was ‘experiencing difficulties’.)
At 5.15pm I finally managed to access the service test page on Virgin Media’s website. This enabled me to test our landline connection ... which appeared not to be faulty. I have therefore booked an engineer call, and they should be arriving between 4.00pm and 7.00pm today to sort the problem out.
We had the same problem in April last year, and they traced it back to the box where the incoming cable enters our house. On that occasion the engineer checked the connections and resealed the box ... and told us that it ought to be replaced.
It hasn’t been ... and I’ll be more than a little unhappy if the faulty box is the cause of the problem.
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Hi Bob,
ReplyDeleteHmmm...perhaps you are like me that I consider we are in the lap of the Gods when it comes to solving telecommunications, internet, phones ourselves etc...yes, even our cloths washing machine is computerized! Hope it all works out for you. KEV.
Kev Robertson,
DeleteIf the problem is the junction box on the front of our house, it’s been there nearly twenty years, and will need to be replaced. The problem is the the service provider is happy to take payment for providing a service ... but less happy making sure that their equipment is properly maintained.
For good or ill, computerisation of our lives is one genie that we will not be able to put back into the bottle.
All the best,
Bob
I almost moved over to Virgin for phone and internet last month as my longstanding BT account had crept up in price and they were being very inflexible on haggling it down a bit. On the day of the transfer (after having shifted lots of email accounts over from BT) I discovered that Virgin had delayed my installation by at least 4 weeks but hadn't bothered to tell me!
ReplyDeleteAfter a lot of phoning and checking with BT that my current package would stay in place for the next month, BT decided that they 'could' be flexible after all and halved my monthly costs immediately and brought them into line with Virgins deal. After I cancelled the Virgin installation I then discovered that most of the neighbouring streets were without Virgin for a couple of weeks due to someone drilling through a cable! A lucky escape and it just shows it's always worth haggling (even if we're British and don't like that sort of thing...)
Alastair,
DeleteI've tried to move from Virgin Media to another service provider BUT then discovered that when the fibre optic cable was installed many years ago by a firm called Videotron, they removed all the BT cables ... and all the alternative service providers use BT cabling.
(Videotron is a Canadian company that won a licence in the late 1990s to install fibre optic networks in the UK. They supplied us with phone, Internet, and cable TV ... and then sold out to Cable & Wireless ... who sold out to NTL ... who then became part of Virgin Media.)
We are therefore stuck with Virgin Media unless and until we pay for the BT cables to be reinstalled ... and the cost of doing that is prohibitive.
Luckily the outage has only affected our landline and not our Internet connection. (We gave up on cable TV when the cost kept going up in 'exchange' for channels we never watched; we are now with Freeview and Amazon Prime ... and hardly notice the lack of cable channels.)
All the best,
Bob