back to article Virgin Media broadband in two-day wobble

Virgin Media customers in London and the South East have been rocked by internet outages that cut them off from big sites including Wikipedia, Yahoo! and the Guardian yesterday and this morning. Reg readers bombarded our inbox to report pockets of dicky service, which seemed to start on Sunday morning and is still ongoing for …

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  1. Jamchal
    Holmes

    As stated previously, you're paying for a residential broadband service which has gone down accross multiple local regions throughout the past few days.

    Clearly this isn't an acceptable level of service, but it's to be expected occasionally.

    For those who claim that their internet service is crap etc. etc. How many times have you phoned / complained to them on each and every occasion the service goes down / fails.

    I used to work for these people, believe me, their 'customer service' is crap, i've experienced it first hand. But what is interesting is that when 1 thing went wrong, a user would phone, complain that the service has gone down and has been terrible for the past <insert months / years here> and they're not happy.

    Further checks reveal they have called about this issue once before 7 months ago where an outage caused temporary loss of service.

    Suffice to say I no longer work for these people, I would still go by saying their internet service works well compared to my ADSL friends and colleagues. Their customer service however consistently fails to impress me.

    Especially the stuff about browser settings / patches / computer settings... this isn't 2004 virgin, people don't have that much spyware anymore.

    sherlock because more diagnosis is required other than ping tests and traceroutes.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I have been with NTL / Virgin for 14 years. I had no real issues until recently. I upgraded from my 10mb connection cus it was flaky now and then to have the worst internet connection in the world.

    Oh well. At least it plays world of tanks without anissue.

  3. Hyphen
    FAIL

    Oh what I would give

    Oh what I would give for a Virgin Media connection[1], even WITH these routing issues.

    I'm currently seeing ~75% packet loss on my BT ADSL connection.

    This is fairly usual when it rains. BT claim there's no such problem and that it must be CPE failure. According to India, there's apparently no such thing as a master socket and I must be keeping my Home Hub (I'm using a 2Wire Business Hub) in the rain for this fault to occur! I did try to argue that if I subjected the Home Hub to rain I'd probably see 100% packet loss, but they ignored me.

    I need to move to a cabled house!

    [1] I called Virgin and offered to reimburse them for the full cost of the co-ax installation. No cost to them, plus at least 2 years' business on XXL. They refused.

    1. Steve Evans

      If it's that bad then it probably impacts the voice phone line. Try reporting that and tell them you get crackles, pops etc on the line when it rains. They tend to respond to problems with voice lines with a little more professionalism.

  4. McToo
    Thumb Up

    So that settles it!

    Our TopUp TV box is getting a bit old and I was going to change my pretty much rock solid BeThere ADSL/BT Phone line/TopUp TV stuff to a Virgin 'all in one' package (we're in a cabled area), so I could save a paltry few quid, get marginally faster broadband (I'm about 200 yards from my telephone exchange) and get a few more channels of dross. However, thanks to the glorious readers of El Reg reminding me about VMs abominable DPI & Indian script reading call centres, I don't think I'll bother now.

    Thank you all!

    1. Paul_Murphy

      Don't forget that you rarely hear the good news.

      For all the various 'VM is down today' stories you never get the 350+ 'VM working fine today' stories.

      I'm in the Watford area and have seen few problems with the service itself - the most annoying thing about VM is that they don't pass on cheaper package rates when they are available. In the past I would notice that our service was quoted at a cheaper rate on the website and would phone up to complain - normally getting a discount.

      As for the service once I started using OpenDNS on my router it seems steadier than it was - not that it was too bad before.

      I'm sure that if you visit BT or other websites (aside from BE probably) you will see similar stories and reach similar conclusions.

      Oh - I have no affiliation to VM or BE or anyone else, I'm just a customer.

      ttfn

      nb - 50meg service is very useful in our household (3x computers, 2x laptops, Wii, PS3 ...)

  5. Jon Smit
    FAIL

    Hosted sites down too

    Pitpass a site hosted by Virgin has been down over the weekend too.

    "...An intermittent fault throughout the Korean Grand Prix weekend finally developed into a full blown disaster early this morning, when our umbilical chord to the ether was finally severed. Thanks to sterling work by Business Media we are now back online and slowly catching up..."

  6. GrantK
    Holmes

    Bromley/ Croydon

    Internet was out for most of Saturday afternoon down this way (border of Croydon and Bromley). When I called Virgin Media I was told it was a fault in the area and they offered to put £10 credit on my account for the hassle.

    They answered almost immediately so I do not think there was a huge amount of calls at that point.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Recent flakiness

    Been experiencing intermittent routing issues for a couple of weeks (Basingstoke).

    Also both cabinets in my street have been rewired in the last week (no connectivity for a couple of hours).

    But customer service really sucks - especially when you're speaking to the 0845 "helpline" on your mobile because your landline is down - and you're paying for the 25 minute call yourself...and the tech calls out an Engineer for next Tuesday afternoon (and it's a Friday night and you have no landline, bb or cable TV and there are "no local issues")...and you fancy a pint and as you walk out your door you notice that the engineers have sneaked back unnoticed and have got the cabinet door open yet again...

    At a time like this one tends to forget the exceptional reliability one has experienced in the last 12 years since signing up with Comtel=>ntl=>VM, and the rock solid 50/5 24/7 bb performance one routinely obtains from one's Superhub. Bah.

  8. Lloyd
    Thumb Down

    Ahhhh

    That explains why it's been taking 30 seconds to load a page.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    NTL have always been rubbish....

    ...and thier penny pinching ways means that will never change.

    However, STOP thinking any service should be 24/7 365. I can't be. Realise this and stop whining like spoilt brats.

    Faults occur and when they do, someone goes out to fix them. It's not as if your never going to get service back again. You, like the rest of us just have to wait till it's fixed.

  10. Fab De Marco

    My 2 pence on Virgin Media Support

    On Noticing my router (VM non-Super HUB only on 10Mb) had no power I thought oh well I suppose I'll call them and get a replacement sent out, one of the beauties of their support infrastucture is that you do not own the equipment, therefore its their responsibility.

    So I call them up and its like this....

    Me: Hi My Hub won't power on I would like a replacement

    VM: So your Internet is not working

    M: No of course it isnt

    VM: Have you tried rebooting your hub?

    M: Yeah, tried the switch on the off chance and also tried another power source but still nothing

    VM: OK so If you open a web browser on your computer and type.......

    M: There are no lights on the router. It does not power up

    VM: Oh there's no lights on it at all?

    M: That is correct.

    VM Oh you need a replacement then.

    M: Thank goodness you were here to diagnose my fault.

    A Good support rep would have listened to my opening statement then followed the RMA Procedure.

    A script reader would have sent a lesser mortal round the houses for about 20 minutes before finding the problem.

  11. Ojustaboo

    7 days for an engineer

    My internet went completely off line Sunday night. Was back up again Monday Morning.

    Monday night went off totally again (modem and internet on Tvio box offline).

    Phoned Virgin, earliest they can get an engineer out is next Monday, 7 days time.

    Personally I find being expected to wait 7 days in this day and age when say son needs internet to log into college etc, totally unacceptable.

    Luckily for them it was back up this morning.

    Am on their 100Mbit service, reason I wanted this (legality aside) is so that when I want to download a TV show off of newsgroups, I can do so in about 1 min. Due to their extreme traffic shaping, doing this from around 4pm to midnight goes slower than dialup.

    As I had no internet, thought I'd catch up on some of the stuff I'd recorded over the past week on their Tvio box. But as I had no network connection on my Tvio box, it wouldn't let me watch anything I'd recorded Grrr

    1. cortezcortez

      Just 7?

      Xmas 2010 I lost internet for two days. When I called Hyderabad - sorry, Virgin Media Customer Services - I was told this:

      "We can send an engineer on 24 January."

      Slammed the phone down, I did, and started looking for a new supplier. As it happened I got my service back that night (somehow) and never bothered changing. But recent poor performance and this week's problems have got me looking again.

  12. Scorchio!!

    As much as I hate using what amounts to a monopoly (on cable connections), no problems in Aylesbury.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No problems here currently (Oxford) but I've had similar issues three times in the last month (off for 2 days on one of those occasions).

    Having been with VM for a few years I now know that when it's off it's off. All you can do is wait till it comes back (remembering to re-boot you modem occasionally as it can get stuck in "off" mode). Your neighbour may or may not be having the same problem. If you phone, they will deny there's any problem and go through some token diagnostics before fobbing you off.

    There is no correlation whatsoever between the internet coming back on and any number of phone calls you might make.

  14. damien c

    Worked fine for me

    Well my Virgin Media connection (100mb) worked fine all weekend, and has done ever since it was installed.

    While my dad's 50mb connection was down as well as the test modem's we have as well.

    It was affecting people in the North as well not just the South.

  15. Bgfreeman

    Can't find anything say whether this is Virgin's ADSL (poo) or cable broadband.

    We had slowdowns and 404's on Saturday and Sunday for some US sites and we're on cable.

    I'm guessing a router somewhere playing up, or maybe a DNS server.

  16. cortezcortez

    Going on longer than that, and still happening now. It's taken me an hour to open any web page this evening.

    Also, major speed issues. Speedtest gave me a download score of 0.09Mbps Saturday. I believe I'm paying for 10Mbps.

  17. virginsuck
    Thumb Down

    Virgin newbie astonished at appalling customer service

    Intermittent-to-zero internet since Sunday ongoing in SE London and told today that it wont be fixed until 'at least 25th October' ! So that will be approx 2 weeks with virtually no meaningful service.

    New to Virgin Media and totally appalled at their shocking customer service having been told a variety of different 'reasons' for the lack of speed (down to 0.2Mbps at times).

    All departments - Indian call centre, Welsh call centre, billing, cancellations etc etc astonishingly unhelpful and even rude.

    Would never recommend this outfit to anyone.

  18. ducatis'r us
    Unhappy

    virgin media

    here in cardiff the broadband service disappeared at around 11.00 on wednesday evening. Fix time on Virginmedia website is 3.15 am tomorrow morning

    Not happy

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