[Wylug-discuss] How do you rate Virgin/NTL broadband?

[Andrew J Cole]

Finally (last week) received the portables for the two retired former
colleagues who have just vacated their office (and IT facilities) in
the university.

These two are long time NTL cable customers and the physical installation
of the two cable modems was quickly arranged, a couple of days, and only
took a few minutes to install.

Interestingly the Virgin Broadband HOWTO booklets left by the engineers
were totally different, the verbal advice given differed except that no
attempt should be made to install anything from the CD in thw "Welcome
Pack" and (as it proved) the personal information they left were total
works of fiction.

So two setups a few miles apart - shouldn't take any more than a couple
of hours each?  Not if you need to involve Virgin/NTL in the process.

The first install with both portables in one location didn't take anywhere
near as long as the initial Vista boot to get the WiFi configured etc. but
getting the cable modem enabled was another matter.  The engineer had
written down the details including the numeric IP of the Virgin autoreg
site however the web site refused to recognise the details as supplied.

Phoned the (free) Help Line who eventually answered (a thirty minute
queue) and said call the (not free) Technical Help Line, kicked up a
fuss "its your administration at fault not a technical fault everything
is ok except for the details needed to satisfy your autoreg site -
you deal with it or get someone who can to call us back" so we got a
call back from "Technical Help" in India quite quickly.  She just took
the MAC address of the cable modem (not the address of the router as
she repeatedly insisted she needed!) and bingo after a power cycle the
portables were doing twenty something MS Updates.

Next day I called at the second site - this would be trivial.  Fifteen
minutes to setup the router then look at the paperwork.  This engineerr
had left a much better booklet - it even had a Macintosh section and the
URL of the aureg site and that very day a letter from Virgin/NTL had
arrived with the account number and pin.  The pin matched the one the
engineer had written in the booklet but not so the account code - still
one would certainly work.  No way - the autoreg site similarly didn't
recognise the customer details with either account code.  Wait in a long
line for the (free) Help Line - get through and they provided a third
account code but wouldn't hold on while it was tested.  This code was
instantly rejected by the autorreg site - the hand written one and the
one in the letter at least were not rejected.  There was again a long
queue for the Help Line so we tried the "Technical Line" from the NTL
phone - the number was dead over many tries over half an hour - back
to the help line who could only suggest that we put in a line fault
to Virgin/NTL (they said they couldn't do that!).  To cut a corner I
tried the Technical Number on my mobile - it rang first time (clearly
they weren't being pestered by customers using Virgin/NTL phones!).
They rang me back immediatly (at their suggestion), registered the cable
modem MAC address quickly but cycled thro sensible e-mail names rather
than dishing out a daft one and leaving that to the customer to sort out.

My conclusion - Virgin/NTL broadband works fine (not so their smtp
relay - but thats another story) and would be a doddle to setup if their
administration wasn't such total crap.  I presume that if the web site
had recognised the account details the cable modem MAC would have been
requested (presumably its actually on file already against the customer
account?) and it would have been authorised and the final stage would
have been to generate an e-mail address - all without human intervention -
but we never got that far.

btw I was rather amused to see, in the second booklet, that they intend to
convert all the customer e-mail address to the Virgin brand; that should
be an interesting exercise.

Andrew

btw I think we were "gazumped" by eBuyer over these portables: they
    eventually cancelled the order after a couple of weeks of non-delivery
    and various excuses about resupply problems with Toshiba.  I have
    never had any a bad experience with eBuyer previously but on this
    occasion either their actual stock level was seriously at variance
    with their web/order site or they "gazumped" a larg number of orders
    to satisfy a single large customer or perhaps the recent currency
    movements made resupply of that model (at their published price)
    uneconomic.

    A quick shop around threw up http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/ in
    Huddersfield who not only undercut the original eBuyer price but they
    had stock which one could even collect.  I am very impressed with
    them as an organisation as were the people who made the collection.