VF (and other ISPs) don't often get thanked, but you will always hear from people (including me when things don't go so well - and believe me being on cable with VF in Wellington, I've had my share of this - the congestion thread from last year became a second home :)

Anyway, the other night it was very windy in Wellington (who would have thought).  We had been having flaky HFC for a couple of days, and then Weds morning it gave out completely.  I had an entire household of 3 kids and my partner in withdrawal symptoms.  The cats didn't seem to mind though.

There was nothing on the VF status page - VF thought everything was green (although they do have a very optimistic outlook on life - the status page always seems to say all is well).

I took a very deep breath and called the help centre.   After waiting for 25 minutes, I was finally connected to a human (albeit for some reason in the mobile section).  They duly transferred me to someone else.  Also not in the HFC ninja area.  Finally third time lucky and 30 mins in I got to talk to someone who knew what they were talking about.

I explained that I had done power cycling and all the usual steps, was running wired connections as well as wifi etc, and they mercifully did not make me go through each step again.  They confirmed that Downer was doing some work on the cable in the area, and that the net was down for a number of people.  Set up one of our mobiles with unlimited data for a week, and sent me on my way with an assurance that it would soon be fixed.  BTW - the mobile hotspot was great - enough to almost service the whole data hungry house, and fast enough to stream netflix on the lounge TV in HD.

Weds night though and its still not fixed.  I called VF who said the fault had been fixed.  Spoke to another nice Ninja who quickly came to the conclusion that it was a hardware issue (my previous great signal was now dead).   He arranged with no fuss for a tech to come round the next day.  

Tech duly comes round the next day as promised.  Wind had blown the cables crossing the street so much that they had lost the connection.  Fixed there and then.  Everything back to normal (although I seem to be maxing out at about 780 Mbps - 100 lower than before, but in the real world who would notice).

Anyway - other than an initial long wait in the first instance, this was a great experience with VF.  Great tech support who did not just walk through a set of scripted actions, but actually talked and listened, and great tech service that came within a day and did what they said they would do.  Can you ask for any better?

Well done VF.