Hello everyone, first time poster but serial lurker! I'm in Margate between WWX and the Hornby and have had terrible broadband all the time I've lived here. The problem is aluminium cable in the road, I gave up months ago trying to get it swapped for copper! I pay for 80/20 business fibre and get 11/0.5 at best! Anyway, I have worked for Openreach both as an engineer and as an Operations Manager and also for a contracting company installing for Virgin Media (NOTE, this was just before they took over the network, in those days it was NTL). I was running a gang of 3 guys getting cable in from the T outside and doing the internal fits.
I'm interested in what goes on with this, so thought I'd join the forum & see what's what. Actually I wouldn't mind working for VM as a local manager seeing as they are expanding, anyone got any connections? I tried the VM job site to no avail...
Anyway, regarding one of the earlier posts about cabling from the street into the premises, if it's anything at all like it used to be, it will be push, push, push by VM to get everything in as quick as possible. When I was on the tools for them, we sometimes had up to 8 jobs a day and were threatened with the sack if they weren't all completed, so we used to join up with other crews and help each other out.
I really hope this ethos has changed as it just means shoddy workmanship. We had a supervisor who would check the depth of buried cables (we used either armoured direct burial shotgun or put a length of copex in and ran the cable inside that) and if it was out of tolerance he would rip it out the ground and make us go back and do it again! It was all performance driven, but this was in the late 90s/early 2000s (random fact, I was installing in a customers house and when we put the TV on it was the world trade towers attack and the first plane had hit, but second hadn't hit yet, we just stood there with jaws on the floor!)
In the end, we turned up for work one morning and the company went into liquidation and everyone lost their jobs.
So hopefully quality control is there and the schedule is within reason!