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Not entirely Happy

After the fcuk up that was the band width monitor, and the sudden revision of the used allowance on the 30th of January I was told by James Ormerod that no-one would be billed for excessive use for January.

"Hi Ian,

We are aware of the presentation issue and we are replacing the graphs in the next day.

Your usage is actually 28GB & 34GB however it's not been displaying right for a number of months.

Don't worry, we will not charge you for Jan's usage however I would suggest you install a bandwidth meter & perhaps we should review your package should the usage creep up again this month?



Kind Regards

James Ormerod
Customer Services Team
Vispa Internet Limited
t: 08701 624 888"


So I was not best pleased to be billed an extra £30, especially as they have been in denial and refusing to accept my evidence that the meters have been bust for months.

I emailed James about being billed several weeks ago, but so far have not received a reply.:(
 
What were the usage allowance revisions in January? I couldn't find any news about it on their site.
 
Hi Mark,
As you may know from my previous postings, the bandwidth meters have never worked correctly, the amount used would go up and down at random; my meter could show 18 gig used in the middle of the month, then go backwards for the rest of the month, finishing with a reading of 3-4gig.
At the beginning of January they "fixed" the meters, except they didn't!!; it was mixing up peak and off-peak readings; up until the 18th my meters were still not working correctly, showing nothing used for peak and about 8gig used off-peak; overnight the meters changed to show about 2 gig out of 10 used for peak and 45 gig out of 40 gig used for off-peak.

The off peak meter kept changing at random, until by the 29th it showed about 56 gig used, but the peak meter remained static, then a few hours before the end of the month they changed again, to show 28 and 34.

Prior to January I tried to keep track of my usage via the meters built in to Bittorrent, as that is where most of my bandwidth goes, but the Vispa meters NEVER matched, and would apply usage to Peak or Off Peak at random, so there seemed no point in my trying to keep my downloading to off-peak hours only; sometimes the Vispa meters would add usage even if I had not been online all day!!.

ALL of this I kept badgering Vispa about, I sent them daily snapshots of their own meter readings and my own personal readings.

The meters were not fully "fixed" until the middle of February, when they finally seem to have the Peak and Off Peak usage being sent to the correct meter, up until then some of the Off Peak usage was showing as Peak.

I am still not sure they are fully fixed, I have noticed that, if you start Bittorrent early, ALL of the bandwidth used seems to be labelled Peak, even if the majority of it was used during Off Peak; last night I started 2 hours early because I had more Peak left than Off Peak on my allowance; this morning the Bittorent meter showed about 8 1/2 gig used up/down; nearly ALL of this went onto my Peak usage chart, which went from 2/10 gig used to 9.2/10 used and nothing seems to have been added to the Off Peak allowance

The limits for the package I am on are 10 gig Peak (8am -10pm) and 40 gig Off Peak (10pm -8am).

Being charged when you were told you would not be is bad enough, but I was not notified of the bill detailing the charges until 5 days after the money had been taken from my account; and the top-line "Estimated bill" on my control panel stayed at £29.99 throughout.

The delay in the notification was not the billing departments fault though, the Vispa email system is to blame, I have had several emails that have been lost in their system this month, then turned up days or weeks later, the billing email was dated the 4th but turned up on the 19th.
 
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Have others on Vispa also been charged for extra usage during January? I know there was a post about the error on their forum but the Vispa.com site doesn't seem to be coming up (online) this morning so I can't check.
 
It's not working for me either, although I can access my control panel, and through that the forum pages; no-one else has posted a billing problem that I can see.
I dont read the Vispa forums very often, my password and username combo are being rejected, and when I tried to re-register it said my "email domain does not exist"
IT'S A VISPA EMAIL ACCOUNT!!! FFS

There are a lot of problems at the moment, email is once again causing issues; being delayed by days, disappearing entirely etc; since Friday I have been receiving mail but unable to send it, an issue with the IP the SMTP and SMTP2 address's were pointing at; some kind soul on the forums managed to find the correct IP, and entering that directly into the "Outgoing Server" address in Thunderbird fixed that problem; at least until the next thing goes wrong with email!!!
 
I spoke too soon about the meters being fixed; it is now the evening of the 3rd, and my meters still say I have used ZERO; despite downloading about 7-8 Gb over the last few nights, and plenty of surfing well before Off Peak starts.
 
NOW they have applied the usage, but got it back to front,11 gig has been entered as Peak Usage!!!
No reply to any of my last 3 emails, not even an automated response with a support number.
 
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I think we have re-generated the stats on your account to many times :hrmph:

I have seen your support emails as Kevin has assigned them to me. I've been on annual leave so I've been working my way through the backlog!

We've actually changed radius servers so the accounting information has needed a little tweaking as it is presented differently that our old one. No change in usage policy though.
 
Hi James,

I hope you had a nice ski trip.

All through February the charts worked perfectly, at least after the Peak/Off Peak settings were corrected; but so far March has been a mess!!

My usage charts bear no relation to my usage; today's chart shows 9Gb used between 1am and 4am; but my PC was switched OFF at about 00:30, and not restarted until after 10:00; and even then, I was only browsing some forum pages and shop sites, looking at laptops during the evening; the large torrent file I have been downloading night by night (for over a month!),was completed the night before, so bittorrent was not running; before I shut it down, the meters showed I had up/down loaded 28Gb since resetting at the start of the month.

My charts have gone from nothing to over my limits in a night, then back to near zero again the next night, then over my limit again last night!!!

Some days my meters were going backwards again, your own charts showed me using
MINUS 5.33 Gb Off Peak on the 2nd
MINUS 3.84 Gb Peak on the 4th
MINUS 1.23 Gb Off Peak on the 6th


That is from the chart I printed off on the 7th; the chart printed TODAY, for the SAME periods shows

PLUS 10.35 Gb Off Peak on the 2nd
PLUS 4.15 Gb Peak on the 4th
PLUS 6.54 Gb Off Peak on the 6th


The 4th's PEAK figure is particularly interesting; it is

26 times higher than my supposed usage on Saturday 7th when I was online much of the day.

and

4 times higher the previous weekend's figures, when my son and I were BOTH browsing for much of the day (he was using his laptop).

Especially as I work all day and on the 4th was out much of the evening on a Sign Language course!

Could the problem b e something between my house and the local exchange causing false readings?? I know of no one else using Vispa who is having the same level of problems with data reading.
BT are going to need to come out here soon anyway, they never had the tree trimmed after replacing my line and the tree has grown even more; my line is now tangled in the branches and the junction box on the pole has had it's cover ripped off by a branch hitting it.
 
Well, I am back online after a major PC crash last weekend; I took the time to rebuild my PC in a new case with room for some extra drives, although sadly, not as many as I would like, I have run out of controllers AND PCI slots for extras!!

I was not best pleased to find that, not only has there been no reply from anyone at Vispa regarding my complaint, either in here or via email, but they have "closed" my support numbers, as I have "not replied within 48 hours".
Not replied to what?? You have to SEND me something before I can reply to it!!

So I have been billed for January when I was promised I would not (cos the meters were going crazy), and now I am going to get billed for March when their meters went crazy (again), and THEN showed me downloading while my PC was switched off!!!
 
Well, minus 10/10 for communication, but 10/10 for effort, I have just found out (by accident), that the January excess charge has been deducted from my monthly charge, so I am only paying about £5.

I find Vispa tech support very good, and have referred several people to them, although not via the "Refer a Friend" panel, so no free month; I just hope that the problems with the metering has not been sorted, and I can go back to feeling smug when my sister moans about Orange and my brother complains about Pipex.
 
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A switch to internal bandwidth monitors a few weeks ago has cured the problem, hopefully for good this time!!

Interestingly though, they say the fault was causing the monitors to show only 1/3rd of people's usage sometimes, but since their last fix MINE has been showing 3-5 time MORE than I was using.
Since the latest effort though, every meter I have tried agrees with Vispa's own; and the new pipe has shown a good increase in speed when it comes to latency.
 
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