No doubt he'll end up making Virgin Wine out of those sour grapes...

Virgin NTL's approach to customer service

Those who have read any of my earlier posts on the topic will be able to guess how it ends, but here goes anyway.

Over the past couple of months, my broadband had slowed down more and more, the router needed to be turned off and on again nearly every time I wanted to log on etc, so I decided to bite the bullet and give Virgin NTL a call. The automated message told me that there were no problems recorded in my area but that because of problems elsewhere, their engineers were very busy and you'd have to wait for at least an hour before calls would be answered. Fair enough.

So I tried again the next day and got through after about twenty minutes. I told them that I suspected it was their router itself (the little black box on my desk) which had died a death after three years, they checked the connection from their end and told me there were no problems up to the junction box (which I knew anyway, as they replaced/refurbished this about a year ago).

We'll need to send out an engineer, the man said, we've got a slot tomorrow morning between 8 and 12 and another one in a couple of days' time. I asked if they could send him round the next morning, so far so good. I'd pencilled in a nice lie-in until he turned up, but as per usual the engineer turned up at quarter past eight on the dot, he mucked about for a few minutes, plugged in a new router, tested it, and then we logged back on and it all worked tip top fine again.

The old router only had one out-socket, so to get wireless in the house (my wife and daughter prefer wireless to cables) I used to have to then connect it to a wireless splitter/connector thingy, which added to the faff when you needed to 'turn it all off and turn it on again'. They cost about £80 each and none of them lasted much longer than a year.

The new router also has four out-sockets and built in wireless, which is password protected (so my neighbours can't use it for free). So I am a tiny bit miffed that they didn't send me a new wireless router as a matter of course, which would have saved me a couple of hundred quid over the years, but apart from that, I've absolutely nothing to complain about.

I normally give their engineers a tenner, this particular chap had to make do with a fiver because that was all I had on me at the time.

Some things just work

People are always quick to whine when something goes wrong, especially if it is maliciously bad service at the hands of British Gas etc who never turn up when they promise, so I think it's only fair to point out when something goes smoothly.

As previously mentioned, the broadband had been intermittent for the past week or two. I 'phoned Virgin NTL on Thursday morning, who tested the connection remotely, agreed that it was dodgy and promised to send a chap out on Saturday between 8 and 12 a.m. Said chap duly turned up shortly after 9 a.m. and established that the problem was to do with the box in the street, as other people had complained as well. He promised that an engineer would attend to it within the next few hours, made his excuses and left.

Said engineer was on the spot within an hour. I popped out to offer him a cup of tea, which he declined, and he explained that he would have to replace a twelve-year-old transformer-amplifier-splitter-type-thingymajig in the green box, which would take him about five minutes.

Five minutes later, I tried t'internet again, and hey presto, it worked. The engineer even rang the bell before he set off to make sure.

Suitably emboldened, I went into town and bought a new router* to replace the Linksys one that we'd had for years and which had died a death. I followed Step One on the Quick Installation Guide, Step Two looked a bit tricky so I just clicked Explorer on the off-chance it worked, and again, hey presto, it had sort of installed itself.

There. I've said it. Hardly makes for a gripping post though, does it?

* Sitecom DC-202, from Maplins, £25 a pop. It is amazingly teeny-tiny.

Internet on the blink again

Although there are loads of good stories at the moment - for example the gummint's immigration policy moving towards what UKIP have been recommending for years, if it's good enough for Sir Andrew Green, it's good enough for me - but Ye Olde Internet Connection has been really slow since yesterday evening and keeps shutting down again, so I can't do proper posts at the mo'.

Internet connection dodgy

Ye olde broadband in our house has been woeful slow since yesterday evening, making blogging frustrating to the point of impossible. And it's my birthday anyway so I might just log off for a day.

Yippee! Hurray! (3)

The cable guys have been and I'm up and bloggin' again!

Yippee! Hurray! (2)

The cable guys installed the telephone socket (we kept our old number!) and modem this morning as promised. There was a bit of a hiccup with a non-existent PIN, the call centre lady in India told me that 'sales' had forgotten to ask for one, and that their systems were down so it would take another day to generate a new one.

Sulk. Fume. Fosters and fags. Sit in garden and plan next move.

Suitably emboldened, I rang back half an hour later and repeated my tale of woe (skipping the lies with which the first call centre lady had tried to fob me off) and a nice Geordie lady called Jill had it up and running within half an hour or so. Her version of events was that they'd set me up on the old NTL broadband, which is not active where we now live and that she'd had to transfer me to the Virgin broadband system.

Jill - whoever you are - you rock!

Internet connection

They will not be able to connect me until the end of the month, so blogging will be fairly light for the foreseeable. I am posting this from one of the computers in the village library.