[Scottish] Broadband advice

[Colin McKinnon]

On Wednesday 05 January 2011 01:48:38 pm Jason Irwin wrote:
>
> Looking at Virign Media just now, any good?
>

On the whole yes - the infrastructure is **very** good - fibre to the wall of 
your house means you get the bandwidth they advertise, and on the whole 
service is very reliable. They were never very good at services (NTP, email, 
and the bundled hosting package is rubbish) and since the Virgin takeover 
they seem to be trying to land grab by running transparent proxying for all 
port 80 stuff and adding "value" by pre-filtering email. There's only been 
about 2 or 3 significant outages I've noticed in the time I've been using 
them (12 yrs now) all due to problems with their DNS services (switching to a 
seperate server solved the problems for me).

As for support? Well its a call centre in Asia somewhere who work from a set 
of about 4 scripts for diagnosing internet problems - they don't even 
acknowledge the existence of Apple Macs, let alone Linux. And you can expect 
to spend 30 minutes in a queue for the privilege - but I've been involved in 
some very serious and expensive support contracts with detailled SLAs which 
have been about as much use.

Good luck,

C.