Xbox Live gamers blown offline by 'Virgin Media routing balls-up' An unknown number of Virgin Media customers have been locked out of Xbox Live due to unconfirmed reports from users suggesting that routing issues are affecting the telco. The Register has asked VM and Microsoft – which owns Xbox – to explain what had caused the service to go titsup for some users since at least the early …
I really liked my 50Mbps service from Virgin while I had it. I felt it was a great product and the customer service was OK. BT's customer service was not just worse, but snottier too.
Virgin did accidentally disconnect me once (engineer doing another flat left us disconnected), that was annoying, but I complained and got money back.
The worst thing Virgin did was take a functional, well behaved Superhub (we got ours on R30 and it was fine except for 40Mhz wide WiFi (300Mbps)) and forced an update on it that screwed the wireless and something on the routing. It stopped SSH & VPNs from working. I had to go to modem mode.
I think Virgin's problem is it needs greater technical competence in some key areas. The firmware debacle has been pretty shockingly bad. If you can forgive them for that and run in modem mode, it's still one hell of a lot better than ADSL2+
blew steam offline on Saturday night....(as welll as most of the rest of the internet) in the middle of a close game of left 4 dead...
Bastards take my money and invest 0.0000000001p of it in actually running/upgrading the service
a quid says they are still using the NTL/Telewest gear they inherited when they bought out those telecos 6 yrs ago
a quid says they are still using the NTL/Telewest gear they inherited when they bought out those telecos 6 yrs ago
Eh? what? When who bought who?
FWIW, Telewest bought NTL (it would have been the larger NTL buying the smaller Telewest, but then the BBC could have pulled the plug on the UKTV channels deal). This is pretty much where the buy-out story ends.
Since then, NTL:Telewest have paid Virgin ~£10million for the right to use the Virgin brand (as Virgin Media) for 10 years. A percentage of the £10million was a share allocation to Virgin Holdings which means the Richard Branson is a minor share holder in NTL:Telewest, trading as Virgin Media. Part of the deal is also that Branson does some adverts/promotion work, for which he is paid, on behalf of the company.
Somewhere in between the NTL/Telewest merger, (or was it before??) and re-branding as Virgin Media, Virgin Mobile was purchased.
All this just goes to prove that advertising works. Most people seem to think Virgin bought NTL and Telewest and created Virgin Media and Richard Branson runs the company.
As far as the infrastructure goes, I doubt any of the fibre or co-ax has been replaced but most of the street boxes etc have had their contents replaced or upgraded since then. The old kit didn't have a hope in hell of producing the BB speeds currently available.
Discloser. Not a share holder, I think current customer service is poor and have been a customer since the local cableco was United Artists.
Incidents like this make me long for them to be forced to open up their network to Virtual Network Operators. I do not want to switch to DSL or 3G because I find cable to be superior for high data rates and reliability, but since Telewest/Blueyonder was amalgamated into Virgin Media quality has gone downhill.
I'm seeing a "An error occurred. Please try again later", accompanied by a fake analogue-noise "not tuned in"-kind-of image.
If I connect via Orange instead, then the video works (although it judders to a halt every 10 seconds because they don't have the bandwidth)
Vids on the BBC website and elsewhere work just fine.
I wonder if Virgin Media use the same flaky web-traffic-proxying system that Voda use, and it had a bad update recently...?
We were quite happy with VM cable until, following the broadband going a bit iffy, their engineer installed a SuperDUD, then it all went to Rat-Shit.
The SuperDUD is basically USELESS as a wireless router, but seems reasonably stable when switched to Modem-only mode. (Fortunately, I still had my old wireless Netgear router). VM have been struggling for WEEKS now to resolve, but have still not fixed it.
More details from numerous pissed-off customers at:
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Wireless-Networking/Connecting-wireless-devices-needs-a-reboot-on-R36/m-p/1476822
That one thread already runs to TWENTY-SIX pages (and is page is MUCH more than a screenful).
VM have got it VERY BADLY WRONG and should be compensating customers like O2 did for their outage.
I got £20 off my next bill after complaining, but that is not the point, VM should GET IT RIGHT!!
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