Computers and stuff...
- Thread starter guerney
- Start date
It does seem an act of god (or richard)
Virgin Media confirms internet outages with users across UK disconnected – business live
Company’s own website down as well as internet inaccessible for many. Follow all our live coverage of business, economics and financial markets
www.theguardian.com
.................
www.theregister.com
I still can't access this forum using virginmediaIt does seem an act of god (or richard)
last time it happened to me (about month ago) I took advice from IT support ("it's message from above that you should take day off"), but I can be delinquentVirgin Media confirms internet outages with users across UK disconnected – business live
Company’s own website down as well as internet inaccessible for many. Follow all our live coverage of business, economics and financial markets
UK's Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage
Even managed to kick its own website into touch in spectacular fail
www.theregister.com
Virgin Media is a subsidiary of Liberty Global plc, the world's largest international cable company. On 7 June 2013, pursuant to a series of mergers, Virgin Media Inc. ("Virgin Media") merged into separate wholly-owned subsidiaries of Liberty Global plc ("New Liberty Global").
Virgin Media is rated "Bad" with 1.5 / 5 on Trustpilot
Do you agree with Virgin Media's TrustScore? Voice your opinion today and hear what 94,088 customers have already said.
uk.trustpilot.com
Zen Internet is rated "Excellent" with 4.5 / 5 on Trustpilot
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one of my customers' office is located in an area where phone signal is poor, ADSL is only up to 12mb/s and no cityfibre. The only high speed provider is Virgin Business Cable. They pay £100 a month for 100mb/s service with static IP. The problem is their technology is 20 years old. The router is a Hitron 4 and it gets stuck now and then at the authentication stage for no good reason.
There is nothing anyone can do, just sit and wait until it sorts itself out.
BTW, SIP phones don't work well on their fixed IP.
Andy Brown's blog: Virgin Media business cable and static IPs (thebmwz3.co.uk)
if you read the article above, I can confirm that DMZ works well with their static IP through GRE tunnel.
I pay Vodafone £30 a month for 900mb/s and in the last 4 years, I never had to contact support.
There is nothing anyone can do, just sit and wait until it sorts itself out.
BTW, SIP phones don't work well on their fixed IP.
Andy Brown's blog: Virgin Media business cable and static IPs (thebmwz3.co.uk)
if you read the article above, I can confirm that DMZ works well with their static IP through GRE tunnel.
I pay Vodafone £30 a month for 900mb/s and in the last 4 years, I never had to contact support.
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I've had to contact Virgin Media's support twice this past week, plus another five times in total since 2007, including when they were Blueyonder. I haven't made a change in the services I use (just broadband) for about a decade, so I'm off contract, or should be unless they have somehow put me back on contact when they raised prices... so I could simply stop paying my bill (I've never paid by direct debit) and I'd get disconnected after I've connected some other service - I shouldn't need to experience the "Disconnect me" runaround. I have a SIM router as a backup connection. At home I don't need static IP, I could simply buy a second for redundancy with a combined cost of basic slow broadband for about £20 a month, as I don't need high speed. Quite honestly 128k would do.
Unix time starts counting from 1/1/1970. Some deep network borkage has occurred. It reminds me of Site5, when after acquisition by a shark similar layoffs occurred... their previously brilliant services were degraded, people became unavailable for contact; replaced by unmonitored communication channels - I had to embarass them on social media to get their attention, after which I told them to f off. I'm expecting the same to happen with Guru.co.uk soon, now that they've sold themselves out. Looking at the history of the shark which has eaten them, I'm hopeful it won't.
Unix time starts counting from 1/1/1970. Some deep network borkage has occurred. It reminds me of Site5, when after acquisition by a shark similar layoffs occurred... their previously brilliant services were degraded, people became unavailable for contact; replaced by unmonitored communication channels - I had to embarass them on social media to get their attention, after which I told them to f off. I'm expecting the same to happen with Guru.co.uk soon, now that they've sold themselves out. Looking at the history of the shark which has eaten them, I'm hopeful it won't.
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Strictly FWIW one can apparently get refunded to the tune of £8.75/day ones virgin connection is unavailable (handily, for virgin, only after it's been unavailable for more than two days). Dont ask me how I know.
Edit - make that £9.33
No automatic refunds for tens of thousands of Virgin Media customers
Downdetector, which tracks network issues, received 26,000 reports from people unable to connect to the internet.
www.thisismoney.co.uk
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Refunds are administered by humans, which appear to have been largely removed. Their tech help phone system crashed the second time I rang.
There's always a way to get it all working (probably). But they're not my customers. For SIP, most newer mobile phones have a built-in client, which can connect via WIFI, or via an app like Zoiper.
I have never found sip clients on mobile phones satisfactory. Still, SIP phones in offices don't work well with Vigin Media cable fixed IP. The lines drop now and then for no reason in the middle of a call. They work OK with VM dynamic IP though.
SIP works great on older phones. Low per settings can't be changed on newer phones - they switch network connections off with detected phone inactivity, which is exactly what SIP doesn't need... but the paid version of Zoiper is supposed to mitigate this, or so the salesman told my doubtful ear. With newer phones, it's best to keep them plugged in to prevent them nodding off, if you want to receive SIP calls. Of course, this isn't good for their batteries...
Offices use feature SIP phones (yealink, cisco, grandstream etc). When someone works at home, they just get given a spare handset and I push their profile to the new handset from BT website. I wish android sip client were better but unfortunately, they drop the line quite often and they miss ringing too
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Up until Marshmallow, they never missed calls or dropped lines... but now with ultra low power optimisations of hardware and software, they need to be kept plugged into power via USB with the screen kept on. And that doesn't always work - Motorola don't tinker with Android as much I find, the versions on their older phones especially, are pretty close to stock Android.
Jostling my OnePlus on my person is enough to maintain SIP connection (accelerometer), power optimisations vary with every manufacturer and model.
I did try sip clients on my phone without much success a couple of years ago, gave up at the end.
Best result I got was with a small MS Surface laptop in my garden. You can still see the screen and hear the ring.
Best result I got was with a small MS Surface laptop in my garden. You can still see the screen and hear the ring.
I had a SIP Linksys box connected to a wired handset for years, worked great until the Virgin Media Superhub was forced into my home... After trying in vain to get it working, I concluded they block or interfere with SIP to maximise their sales of phone lines, even though they say they don't. The one thing I didn't try was putting the Superhub into modem mode and connecting via a better router. But I have several old Motorola E3s kicking around for SIP...
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