Post by PeterW on Dec 1, 2007 17:38:19 GMT -5
No, not what you're all thinking!! The Virgn in question is Virgin Media, one of Richard Branson's companies, that supplies our internet via cable.
You may recall that we had problems which one engineer said was the modem, and another said was the cable into our house. We had a crew turn up on Friday to put in a new cable, but when they tested it they said it was already the latest spec cable and didn't need renewing. So another engineer turned up to fit yet another new modem. But he couldn't get it to work!
By this time John was fed up and decided to kick some arse. First of all he was told on the phone that someone would be out on Monday as the engineers only worked on priority business calls at weekends. John asked what the hell did they think this was as both he and I have internet businesses. John's is website design and mine is reprint books. We were both losing money from downtime, so could he please speak to the engineering manager.
He was told that the manager wasn't there at the moment, but that he would ring John either later that evening or early Saturday morning. John said that if the manager hadn't rung by 10 am Saturday with a positive answer he would drive over to see Richard Branson (who lives about half an hour's drive from us) and tell him that one of his companies was buggering us about. He told them that he used to work for Enterprise IG who handle all Branson company advertising, and he had Richard Branson's address still in his old notebook.
Anyway, the area manager did one better than phone, he turned up early this morning, Saturday, together with his lead networking engineer. They did a lot of tests, and went down the road to a control box to turn up the signal to our house to maximum. This time the modem lit up, but wouldn't configure. The manager had another look at the modem, checked the serial number, said a few choice words and declared that it wasn't the latest model and couldn't handle the extra-wide bandwidth to which we'd upgraded. It might have been trying to handle the extra bandwidth that fried our original modem because every time it got warm it cut out.
He sent his lead engineer off to get the latest model modem - like now - even if he had to get a storekeeper to come in from home, gave John his personal mobile number and said to phone him with developments.
The lead engineer, who was rather amused by it all, and possibly just a little in awe of John, was back in about half an hour with a new upgraded modem, but this needed configuring on line from Virgin Media, and this would be done on Moday morning.
John said like hell it will, it will be done now, borrowed the guy's company phone and started blasting away at some poor unfortunate the other end. John told them that as an ex-Fujitsu-Seimens lead network engineer he knew very well what had to be done at their end. It was a matter of three minutes work on their computer and the download of the new configuration should start. It should take less that half and hour to download at our end.
Sure enough, five minutes later the configuration started to download and was finsished in about 20 minutes. So now we're all up and running again! As he promised, John phoned a very relieved area manager.
Virgin Media also said that 'in the near future' they would upgrade us to an even wider new bandwidth which wasn't yet available - and there wouldn't be any charge, nor any increase in our subscription, but we might have to install a later router (our responsibility) to handle the extra bandwidth up to speed.
So, provided you know what you're talking about, it DOES pay not to take 'NO' or 'Later' for an answer, and to kick arse till you get the service that is advertised as 'We put our customers first'! - Yeah, if you kick hard enough!!
PeterW
You may recall that we had problems which one engineer said was the modem, and another said was the cable into our house. We had a crew turn up on Friday to put in a new cable, but when they tested it they said it was already the latest spec cable and didn't need renewing. So another engineer turned up to fit yet another new modem. But he couldn't get it to work!
By this time John was fed up and decided to kick some arse. First of all he was told on the phone that someone would be out on Monday as the engineers only worked on priority business calls at weekends. John asked what the hell did they think this was as both he and I have internet businesses. John's is website design and mine is reprint books. We were both losing money from downtime, so could he please speak to the engineering manager.
He was told that the manager wasn't there at the moment, but that he would ring John either later that evening or early Saturday morning. John said that if the manager hadn't rung by 10 am Saturday with a positive answer he would drive over to see Richard Branson (who lives about half an hour's drive from us) and tell him that one of his companies was buggering us about. He told them that he used to work for Enterprise IG who handle all Branson company advertising, and he had Richard Branson's address still in his old notebook.
Anyway, the area manager did one better than phone, he turned up early this morning, Saturday, together with his lead networking engineer. They did a lot of tests, and went down the road to a control box to turn up the signal to our house to maximum. This time the modem lit up, but wouldn't configure. The manager had another look at the modem, checked the serial number, said a few choice words and declared that it wasn't the latest model and couldn't handle the extra-wide bandwidth to which we'd upgraded. It might have been trying to handle the extra bandwidth that fried our original modem because every time it got warm it cut out.
He sent his lead engineer off to get the latest model modem - like now - even if he had to get a storekeeper to come in from home, gave John his personal mobile number and said to phone him with developments.
The lead engineer, who was rather amused by it all, and possibly just a little in awe of John, was back in about half an hour with a new upgraded modem, but this needed configuring on line from Virgin Media, and this would be done on Moday morning.
John said like hell it will, it will be done now, borrowed the guy's company phone and started blasting away at some poor unfortunate the other end. John told them that as an ex-Fujitsu-Seimens lead network engineer he knew very well what had to be done at their end. It was a matter of three minutes work on their computer and the download of the new configuration should start. It should take less that half and hour to download at our end.
Sure enough, five minutes later the configuration started to download and was finsished in about 20 minutes. So now we're all up and running again! As he promised, John phoned a very relieved area manager.
Virgin Media also said that 'in the near future' they would upgrade us to an even wider new bandwidth which wasn't yet available - and there wouldn't be any charge, nor any increase in our subscription, but we might have to install a later router (our responsibility) to handle the extra bandwidth up to speed.
So, provided you know what you're talking about, it DOES pay not to take 'NO' or 'Later' for an answer, and to kick arse till you get the service that is advertised as 'We put our customers first'! - Yeah, if you kick hard enough!!
PeterW
