Unbelievable - Virgin Media deliberately degraded my broadband.

[bluekieran]

My Virgin Media 50M line has had an intermittent fault for months. 4th engineer visit today, the engineer opened up the on-street cabinet and told me he was moving me to another "level" (physically a port, presumably a different frequency) as Virgin had put a "tab" on mine - a small round adaptor screwed onto the port that causes the upstream to

Comments

[nils]

WTF??

I'm sure El Reg would love to hear about this...

[korenwolf]

What he said, that's just piss poor service

[bluekieran]

The post you're replying to was originally written for their benefit :)

[s0b]

Despite the fact that Virgin offer the fastest connection I'd not go back to them. The only way to get proper customer service or technical was to select the "I am thinking of leaving Virgin" option.

[bluekieran]

What really sucks is having a problem with your cable broadband and no landline to phone it in on, combined with cunting T-mobile charging 47p/min for 0845 numbers and Virgin not having a geogrpahic number for support (at least not one that works outside office hours).

[mark13]

That's the only thing I really hate about T-Mobile - that cost for their 0845 numbers is ludicrous, and they completely refuse to answer any questions about it.

[mark13]

I've worked for ISPs and have never heard of anything like that before. Was the macguffin in any way remotely programmable by Virgin, or an independent piece of kit like some sort of electronic ballcock?

[bluekieran]

The latter. It looked like an adaptor or something. I'm very curious as to what exactly it is but it was screwed too tightly into the socket I _used_ to be plugged into to be easily removable for prodding and decent photography.

[glensc]

Might be worth holding fire for a little bit on that and see how the line goes.
What it might be is a type of thermal cut out device.
As the laser light produces heat, more data is esentially more light and more heat, so while the connection might deal OK with burst of 50Mb, heat can build up that needs dispating during lesser usage. Prolonged usage my take the heat up to a point where it really needs to cool so rather than throttle it's cut out ( Or more likely a thermal cut out is a lot cheaper and could be considered justified as a safety feature )

This is based on seeign a connection where I work have a ( light ) attenuator not put back when it was moved by BT engineers. Caused all sorts of intersite problems by dropping the connection due to thermal overload, and took quite some time to pin down to that.

[bluekieran]

Nah, the first engineer added an attenuator to the line to get the signal in the right range, and that was added on the cable inside my front room, not out in the cab. Various techies had checked the signal level on the CPE router and signed it off as fine.

Also, aside from the fact I'm not sure more data really = more light/heat, it would as happily cut out when idle as when I was downloading large files, and it's not like I was hammering the 50M line even when I was - there were usually bottlenecks elsewhere.

[thepaintedone]

This guy posts a lot about VM and apparently has some connections with Virgin insiders, so might be worth a chat.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/VirginMediaHighDefinition