Another TITSUP* on this lovely Tuesday: Virgin Mobile takes time out to enjoy the sunshine Virgin Mobile has been having a miserable Tuesday as customers found their handsets reduced to lumps of shiny plastic by a network-wide outage. Calls, texts and mobile data were all affected, and the outpouring of grief has been something to behold. The social media caterwauling began mid-morning in the UK as users discovered …
The only power we have is to vote with our wallet and stop using companies instead of taking to antisocial media to lambast them when they cock up or behave in a way people who like to voice their opinions think is bad.
Like when Starbucks was fingered for effective tax avoidance, there was an outcry for all of a few minutes, the next day walking past Starbucks I saw no fewer people queuing for their overpriced dishwater. If people had stopped using Starbucks - even if only for a few days - the corporate leeches might have panicked and changed things up a bit.
Time to vote with our feet and wallets in the corporate arena (as well as the political one as we are starting to see happen), if they suck, don't spend your money with them even if it means doing without some gewgaw or other.
Clearly, if no-one is any better, and we cannot do without whatever it is they offer, we're shafted and have to pick the lesser of many evils, as I have had to do...
Confession: I admit to being a VM customer myself, I use their broadband because it's cable and they wound up being the current owners of the company I've had my broadband service from since the very early naughties, the only (cable) alternative I am aware of is to use BT, who are even bigger cunts than VM and I will never knowingly use. Mea culpla, mea maxima culpa.
Virgin is very much location-dependent.
I have had a leased line out in the sticks for 5 years and nary a blip. As in not even one, in all that time.
But elsewhere they re-use Openreach services to provide (for broadband and/or leased line believe it or not, yes, I have a "Virgin-managed" but Openreach-provided leased line at another site). My previous workplace also had Virgin via a reseller - no problems. Had Virgin at home for years. One spark-out on a VoD movie once, and that was the little cherubs down the road pulling cables out of the cabinet.
VM get horror stories based more on geographic location (i.e. what old duff cable they inherited from NTL) and who else actually *provides* the service than they ever do on their native lines.
I just luurv their comments that "*some* customers may be experience problems making calls, send texts etc". Have they been taking lessons from Apple? Looking through the Twittersphere this afternoon, it seems like everybody, their families, cats, dogs, duck-billed-platypy and the guy who came to read the gas meter are having the same issue.
Seriously, they would probably get less flak if they'd admit there was a fault when it first happened and then provided genuine updates instead of vague promises that they were working hard to fix the problem.
Virgin (on the ridiculous) Media - a well earned title
We had some issues around the same time with our BT Net Leased Line. We were losing about 10% of packets, which was bad, but even stranger was that we had no upstream bandwidth. Running a speed test (on known servers) we had 90 Gb/s up, and pretty much 0.00 Gb/s up, which as you can imagine made making requests and serving data slightly difficult.
Could be a coincidence, but I wonder if Virgin and BT share some core networks.
I'm pretty sure that mobile internet is always routed through your home network.
And I know that when your phone first sets up a roaming connection with a local network, there is a check with your home network to see that you are kosher.
So both these would be knackered by an outage at home.
Not sure about calls when you're roaming. Is there some sort of contact every time - eg to see that you have credit or to bill you?
Not sure about calls when you're roaming. Is there some sort of contact every time - eg to see that you have credit or to bill you?
That depends if you're pre-pay (PAYG) or post-pay (normal contract).
Traditionally it was all post-pay so when you connect to a network, it checks with your home network if you're roaming enabled. If the SIM is roaming enabled, it will be allowed to make/receive calls/SMS/etc. The operator then sends CDRs in TAP files back home for billing (often few days behind).
That wouldn't really work for PAYG, so a more complex system (CAMEL) allows for real-time CDR exchange in which case, yes, there would be contact before each billable event (call,SMS,MMS, etc).
Skimming through the Virgin Community forum tonight, nothing on there a huge surprise but a few notable ones around "I'm an essential user and rely on my phone", "I'm a carer", "I'm running a business".
If your mobile connection is that important, you should a) Have a spare connection, and/or b) Not be using a budget MVNO. The number of users on there "I've got WiFi but that doesn't help with calls or texts".....
Not that I'm excusing a high profile outage, we don't know the nature of the fault.
I didn’t even notice, I had 4G access , maybe I was out of 2G for a while but it didn’t affect me.
I get 100Gb a month with unused from the previous month rolled over for £20/month at full speed 4G (normally 70-100Mbs) so I’ll stick with Virgin, not had a problem myself, if you have then feel free to find someone who suits your needs better.
I have been contemplating abandoning our landline, it costs around £20 pcm and we never receive calls on it. This incident makes me think again. We live rurally and have a very poor signal on mobile, so odds are, in a major mobile outage, we would have to rely on a landline. I may delay a decision until the Chinese have built our next gen network.
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