[Wylug-discuss] Virgin broadband (North East Leeds)

[Andrew J Cole]

Long e-mail from a retired colleague living in NE Leeds (LS 15).

The gist is that they (without mentioning it to me) have noticed a gradual
decline in their (Virgin) performance over the last 4 or 5 months with
more and more "not responding" messages and problems connecting to
spool mail (they probably wouldn't notice connection problems/delays
with outgoing SMTP).

The N-R messages could well all be mail connection failures since they
occur "out of the blue" and appear to be accompanied by "the screen
text fading" - the latetr probably some artifact of the MS Mail popup.
No specific mention of browsing problems.  Instantly smells like a Virgin
capacity problem to me.

I set up a number of these some years ago (96/97) - Virgin broadband
(X or XL then) with a Buffalo WHR-G54S WiFi router.

They called Virgin who asked them to connect their laptop directly
to the cable modem and "the diagnosis was that they were clear the
problem was with the hub and speed" and the proposed solution "As a
consequence of all their current speed upgrading for everyone to the
faster broadband ... for free, tomorrow, they are (as I understand it)
upgrading my installation to 30 Mb speed + their own Virgin Super Hub".

Of course there will be nothng at all wrong with the Buffalo and if it
is "speed" then I am surprised that the cable modem can get confused on
its LAN side - the implication being that it (sometimes?) wants to run
at 100 Mb rather then 10 Mb.

On interrogation it turns out that another retired colleague (LS 17)
has been having similar but milder problems which have become much worse
over the last couple of weeks.  Neither of them has received any e-mail
or a flyer from Virgin about upgrades btw.

It seesm that Virgin are on maneuvers.  Has anyone else hit this one?

Andrew