Virgin Media? More like Virgin Meltdown: Brit broadband ISP falls over amid power drama Virgin Media, one of the UK's largest broadband and TV cable providers, is suffering an outage right now. If you can't access the internet or watch the telly, then it's not just you. It's quite a few of you. It appears the blackout includes business and home connections, and kicked off around 4pm BST today. At the time of …
Really should have an auto service that sends an SMS to customers to let them know their service may be experiencing issues in their area, and hopefully, an estimated fix time.
It sounds like a no-brainer basic concept. Less people would be likely swamp their customer lines to find out what is wrong.
Disadvantage is an easily accessible record of how often the service goes down for the customer though.
"Really should have an auto service that sends an SMS to customers to let them know their service may be experiencing issues in their area, and hopefully, an estimated fix time."
That requires competent company staffs and real ITs, which is too expensive. Better to get cheap high-school drop-offs on the customer service line and monkeys on the technical support line.
/s
I can't see them being keen on paying £X000+ each time they have a fault for text messages.
Perhaps the additional cost will be an incentive to keep large scale incidents to a minimum?
For that matter surely SMSs would only represent a significant cost if they keep on failing to provide the service to such a large number of customers? Small scale outages would presumably be less of an issue.
For me personally Virgin Media has been on the whole reasonably reliable. It's when things inevitably fall apart - as it will always do occasionally with technology - that the problems start.
Keeping customers informed isn't their strongest point apparently and when I asked them via Twitter this morning what had happened the previous day they couldn't give me any information. Given the scale of the outage I don't think being willing to tell such a large chunk of customers why they weren't getting the service they were paying for is particularly unreasonable. Apparently Virgin Media disagrees.
Ive found the virgin mediia fibre service very reliable.
The eTV they claimis 300 chaannels is really 100 channels, then the same 100 channels in HD, annd then the same 100 channels an hour later. And then you subtract all the dross (reality TVv, repeats, cooking, travel, sport) you end up with about 30 actual usable channels, that merely show the same repeats over and over.
The customer service is dismal to average, providing you dont mind sitttitng with your eart to a phone liistening to lift music for half an hour or more.
But the worst bit is the way they relentlessly jack the price up at regular intervals, you start off paying £40 a month and the next time you look at the bill its £70 or £80 and still rising When Bransons Necker Island got trashed by a hurricane, the bills went up the folllowing week..
I told them to stick it many years ago.
> Really should have an auto service that sends an SMS to customers to let them know their service may be experiencing issues in their area, and hopefully, an estimated fix time.
Any company will think that's a terrible idea. It's telling the customer "we broke your service, you really should switch to someone else." Many won't realise because they're out at the time or weren't using the network. Many will think it's the just some problem with the interwebs and not know who to blame. But tell them it's your fault and they all know.
its still pointless. when my vm broadband goes down i usually check the status page via my mobile, it always shows 'no issue'. Then you click on the diagnose and it says 'unknown issue', finally phone up and after the switch off and on again 'what colour/lights do you have' they tell you it is down in your area. useless.
While mine, in London, was fine when I logged in after 6:00pm the comment about VM's status page is something I can confirm. I've experienced outages in the past when not only was the status page not showing it, but their own front line staff hadn't been told. So they took me through the usual checks, then passed me onto an engineer who promptly says, "Oh yes we've had a lot of reports in your area..." or "Yes there's an outage..."
If your internet connection is important to you, you should have a backup circuit.
I have a Zen primary circuit and a cheap crappy Plusnet secondary and automatic failover, its not rocket science.
Stop whining when your only provider goes down and you're too cheap to pay for a backup service.
This.
Someone quoted complaining about lost clients... Well they actually lost them the moment they made the cost decision to use residential broadband with no failover.
Even if you don't want an additional fixed circuit then tethering off a 4G connection is perfectly acceptable to get things done these days.
It didn't just affect residential connections if the updates from our leased line provider (runs on a VMB tail) are anything to go by. At least we had a backup connection that ran over FTTC so whilst it wasn't anywhere near as quick we still had an element of connectivity. But it's back now so I'll see how many pence we get back in SLA credits for our 3 hours of "downtime".
We have a VM leased line. That stayed up.
We also have a VM-managed, but BT-supplied leased line. That one was down on the timing in the article.
We also have half-a-dozen staff complain that their Internet was "really slow" at home last night (quite what they think I can do about that, I'm not sure!)... almost all of the BT.
I'd be inclined to think that this is at least partly "BT equipment not joining to VM network" rather than just VM on its own - a lot of their connections are now just ordinary BT-resell stuff, not VM at all.
I keep an unlocked Alcatel portable hotspot into which I can insert any spare live data SIM. Then, should the broadband go down, I still have connectivity. (It's been handy a couple of times.)
Why this is beyond Mr. Whining Businessman up there is beyond me. Incidentally, if you think he's whining now, wait until he receives his £1 per day outage compensation.
Helpful VPN advice. Ironically my Virgin BB was restored after being down for most of Monday morning a few hours before this big outage and it stayed up. I was busily shopping for one of those Wifi routers with in-built 4g Modem when it came back.
In the meantime I was running over my phone tether and can confirm that 3 sims don't have the VPN restriction. At least their 'full fat' phone sims any way, cant confirm their data-only sims, but 3 are usually less 'death of a thousand cuts' than the rest of them. ie no extra charge for tethering etc etc.
Stop whining when your only provider goes down and you're too cheap to pay for a backup service.
Or simply don't have the money.
Stop assuming people are living sufficiently comfortable lives that they can afford this. It might not be much to you (even for a 'crappy' line). It might not be feasible for many others.
I can just about manage without gravy at the chippy here in the midlands but have to return back to the northwest on a regular basis to get a steak and kidney pudding fix.
It seems completely unknown elsewhere in the country and the efforts served up by gastro pubs cant complete with a Hollands steak and kidney pudding chips peas and gravy
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