back to article Outage STILL hitting Virgin Media Business broadband customers

A number of Virgin Media broadband customers have been cut off due to a firmware update cock-up, The Register can reveal. Customers using the company's Super Hub 1 services were affected by the outage at the beginning of the weekend, with the company saying it is "working to resolve the problem". However, it is unclear how …

  1. The Onymous Coward

    The Super Hub is a terrible piece of hardware. I run mine in modem mode because I don't want to use Virgin's awful DNS, so it does very little work. I still have to reboot it most days because it is completely unable to recover from a dropped connection.

    1. Anonymous IV

      Business customers don't get the option to run in modem mode! All you can do is a bodge by buying 5 or 6 "fixed" IP addresses and creating a dummy subnet.

  2. Stuart 22

    Time to fix.

    Everything breaks - well best to assume so. The real issue is getting going again. Five days for a business using a VM premium product implies it's pretty important or mission critical to the company and is going to be catastrophic for some. Its like going in to Sony Pictures meltdown mode.

    Mostly you can struggle for a day or two using mobile internet, working from home and such. But a week is different. How could VM let that happen? If they don't know how to fix and or even when - which would appear to be the case - then they should surely be supplying some sort of workaround however degraded.

    If the numbers are really 'small' that should be easy.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Time to fix.

      I agree that things break and it's better to prepare for and expect that than cry because of something out of your control not working.

      My phone just activated itself on 4G and actually beats a lot of broadband offerings in the local area (certainly ADSL2+) - in a pinch, I'd happily run a business off that no matter how unofficial it was. I have, in fact, done exactly that in a school with 500 users that was cut off by their ISP for "using more than an ordinary residential house" - on business broadband that the ISP had installed on-premises themselves! While the bursar yelled at them and stoked up the lawyers, we ran the school for a couple of weeks on 3G sticks, and nobody really noticed. (Needless to say, the contract was terminated despite their protests and we went with an alternative supplier entirely).

      That said, like the other article about bricking a NAS device, don't update firmware without a reason. Windows Updates, you can roll-back or re-image. Device drivers you can uninstall and reinstall. Software you can restore to a previous incarnation most of the time. But firmware is all-or-nothing. Don't do it without good reason, and certainly don't do it automatically on critical hardware the second it comes out. If I were Virgin, I'd have watchdogs on the firmware that auto-rolled-back if they didn't come up on the new firmware within five minutes. The cost of just a handful of incidents like this justifies the extra development cost, and it's a pretty ordinary thing to do (most routers, most servers, etc. already do this for firmware/BIOS).

      And you do have backups for your business-critical connection, don't you? Like a cheap / free ADSL line on another line? Or 3G/4G? Or even just sharing the neighbouring businesses wireless temporarily? No? Shame. My interest level plummets in that case.

      1. John G Imrie

        Re: Time to fix.

        That said, like the other article about bricking a NAS device, don't update firmware without a reason.

        You don't get the choice. The updates are rolled out automatically from Virgin.

      2. Allan 1

        Re: Time to fix.

        VirginMedia sadly don't give you a choice. They forcefully push out the firmware updates, and you cannot opt out of them.

  3. depicus

    Numbers

    The numbers may be "small" but 1 is 1 to many

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Numbers

      1 is 1 to many?

      1. DNTP

        1 is 1 to many

        Technically this is correct grammar since the vast majority of people evaluate 1 = 1 as TRUE.

        1. Pookietoo

          Re: 1 is 1 to many

          Or one (of the relationships) is a one-to-many relationship?

  4. thomas k.
    Facepalm

    last year ... profits plummeted by 90 per cent

    How do companies like this even stay in business?

    1. John G Imrie

      Re: last year ... profits plummeted by 90 per cent

      How do companies like this even stay in business?

      Easy, Profit is just the size of the pot the staff bonus / dividend / share options are measured against and is easily manipulated by the accounts department.

      I'm not sure which figure you should be looking at to measure the health of a business, but the formula

      ( unpaid bills + interest paid on loans ) / turnover

      might be a good starting point

  5. Anonymous Coward
    1. Pookietoo

      THREEE!!!

      (no body)

  6. ShauneBoy

    Since the Weekend...???

    I should be so lucky!!! our current open ticket with Virgin Media Business was opened 3 weeks ago for this issue - and that's not counting the 2 tickets before that that VM automatically close after 24 hours... All in all, been about a month for me of this farce - at best, the connection stays up for 10 or 15 minutes - annoying thing is we have no real other high-speed broadband available (even though there is a BT cab 20 yards from us with stickers plastered all over it that high speed broadband is here - yeah - only if you are connected to that cabinet - ironically, we are connected to one further away that isn't enabled - and no, BT won't re-route us to the fibre-enable cab)

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    Moving to Virgin

    So not a good time to consider moving from Talktalk to Virgin then?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Small Bus

    Surely if your internet connection really is mission critical you have more than a broadband connection?

    1. Pookietoo
      Boffin

      Re: Small Bus

      Yeah, you have a 56k modem too. :-)

  9. AlanDavies

    Diabolically poor broadband service

    OK - so I am apparently one of the few. Like others it seemed to take several days to even begin to persuade Virgin that there was a problem. And it took 50 minutes of wait time to talk to someone - for a business service - which on their web site they claim will get you straight through to talk to someone. Not my idea of straight through! Then they close down the calls every 24 hours because they can see our router connected - either because we reset it - or because it is still connected their side - but not routing any data through to our side. And this despite me specifically asking them NOT to close down the call. I pointed to the 2500 MTU size (it ignore the MTU size in the configuration). I pointed to the static IP addresses the connection through which seemed to cause the lock up. They sent out an engineer to tighten the connection. (What a waste of time). Then eventually they sent an engineer to swap out the PSU (which I offered to do - but clearly that was considered too technical for customers to do themselves. Then they sent out someone to replace the router with an identical one(I offered to set that up too- but no they had to send an engineer) - and all this despite everyone screaming at them saying its the firmware update causing the problem. No wonder there is a 50 minute wait on the phone line. It goes down at least once a day often requiring me to travel back into work at evenings and weekends to reset it. Everyone is thoroughly annoyed at not being able to get to internal portals, security cameras, email etc. Virgin don't seem concerned at all. In fact the only thing that began to make them take any notice was when I refused to pay the monthly invoice - when they pointed out they had sent out an engineer and they don't guarantee any service level. I've now paid to install an ADSL line as backup - which is not s fast - but at least it works. Do you think Virgin will pay me back the installation costs because I am currently locked into a contract? Can anyone tell me if users without multiple static IP addresses also get this problem? And does the problem exist for users with anything other than the superhub1? (Yes the award winning hub......I wonder who gave them that award?)

  10. Bobasaurus

    The date of this article was the 3rd December, we are now at the 23rd December and the problem to my very significant knowledge is still ongoing. I don't regard that as urgently looking for a solution.

    It is all very well some people going on about backup lines etc. but as a small business I am already paying out £500 / month for a decent connection at our main office, why just because the main comms suppliers are incapable of supplying a decent level of service should I have to consider adding a second broadband line into a small sub office. Personally I am sick to the back teeth with providers promising the world, charging the earth yet supplying sub standard services. BT are ripping us off to the tune of millions to provide fast broadband, I am not "out in the sticks" and yet I still cannot get FTTC let alone even a whiff of FTTP, hence I pay through the nose for a leased line. I pay around £50 a month for a Virgin Media Business cable connection at another office, this has started dropping out multiple times a day and requires a router reboot. Yet I have staff who have Virgin Media home connections, they suffer non of the issues business customers do, they pay less and get, in some cases, more than double the speed.

    Businesses are being ripped off by the communication industry as a whole, it really is about time we realised it and started making some noise.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Update?

    So, did anyone's connection get any better then? I think mine is just getting worse, with more regular configuration loss, as opposed to just the connection going down.

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