Virgin Media
Thursday, October 22nd, 2020 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanWhen Virgin Media decide to have an outage, they don’t kid around.
There have been numerous times during lockdown where we’ve lost broadband for at least a day, which is annoying at the best of times, but doubly so when you’re working from home. (Happily we are sufficiently stocked with DVDs, CDs, books and other relatively low tech (!) items that we can entertain ourselves once streaming is no longer an option.
Last night though was a special one. I was playing Civ on the PC when all kinds of error messages popped up and the computer started running diagnostics on itself. I didn’t even realise at that point that the internet had gone, I assumed that something had happened to the PC. Well, it rebooted and everything seemed fine except that that was when I realised that we had no broadband. I checked on the iMac just to ensure it wasn’t the PC arsing around, but no, it was the broadband. Oddly, I was still getting WiFi, but no internet, which in itself is unusual. When one goes, they both go, as a rule.
Checking the Virgin Media website on my phone, I found that everything was down: broadband, cable TV and the landline, though they reckoned it would be fixed by morning. So I went to bed.
Anyway, this morning, I logged on and all seemed well. I came downstairs and it was only when I tried to demonstrate the Amazon Echo to colleagues during our weekly informal online chat that I realised that we had a problem.
Earlier in the year, I bought a mesh WiFi system to counter the odd dead spots in the house – it’s only a small house but the Victorian method of building (to paraphraseaitch_pea) using a combination of marshmallow and diamond, meant that there were bizarre WiFi blank areas. That’s worked pretty well, but it is hard wired into the main router, meaning we effectively have two WiFi systems working through a single connection. So the “Eero” (mesh) system pretty much slaves of the Virgin Hub and our devices just log on to whichever signal is strongest at any point. Usually it’s pretty seamless.
But this morning, the mesh WiFi was working but the principal WiFi wasn’t and all the Amazon Echo devices (except the recent addition in the kitchen) predate the mesh and link directly to the principal hub WiFi. We had internet access, but not from the Virgin Hub. Or at least it was wired internet to the Eero gateway and WiFi thereafter.
It’s all fixed now – a reboot of the Virgin Hub put that right, but interestingly, it could have been days before I noticed had I not needed to use the Amazon Echo and having logged in to the Virgin Media website it was reporting a possible data breach and recommending users reset passwords accordingly.
It would have been nice to have an email. Had I gone to bed before the outage occured, I might not have known for some time that there were any issues.
The long and the short of it is, if you subscribe to Virgin Media for broadband etc, log in and change your password. They might not bother to tell you.
There have been numerous times during lockdown where we’ve lost broadband for at least a day, which is annoying at the best of times, but doubly so when you’re working from home. (Happily we are sufficiently stocked with DVDs, CDs, books and other relatively low tech (!) items that we can entertain ourselves once streaming is no longer an option.
Last night though was a special one. I was playing Civ on the PC when all kinds of error messages popped up and the computer started running diagnostics on itself. I didn’t even realise at that point that the internet had gone, I assumed that something had happened to the PC. Well, it rebooted and everything seemed fine except that that was when I realised that we had no broadband. I checked on the iMac just to ensure it wasn’t the PC arsing around, but no, it was the broadband. Oddly, I was still getting WiFi, but no internet, which in itself is unusual. When one goes, they both go, as a rule.
Checking the Virgin Media website on my phone, I found that everything was down: broadband, cable TV and the landline, though they reckoned it would be fixed by morning. So I went to bed.
Anyway, this morning, I logged on and all seemed well. I came downstairs and it was only when I tried to demonstrate the Amazon Echo to colleagues during our weekly informal online chat that I realised that we had a problem.
Earlier in the year, I bought a mesh WiFi system to counter the odd dead spots in the house – it’s only a small house but the Victorian method of building (to paraphrase
aitch_pea) using a combination of marshmallow and diamond, meant that there were bizarre WiFi blank areas. That’s worked pretty well, but it is hard wired into the main router, meaning we effectively have two WiFi systems working through a single connection. So the “Eero” (mesh) system pretty much slaves of the Virgin Hub and our devices just log on to whichever signal is strongest at any point. Usually it’s pretty seamless.But this morning, the mesh WiFi was working but the principal WiFi wasn’t and all the Amazon Echo devices (except the recent addition in the kitchen) predate the mesh and link directly to the principal hub WiFi. We had internet access, but not from the Virgin Hub. Or at least it was wired internet to the Eero gateway and WiFi thereafter.
It’s all fixed now – a reboot of the Virgin Hub put that right, but interestingly, it could have been days before I noticed had I not needed to use the Amazon Echo and having logged in to the Virgin Media website it was reporting a possible data breach and recommending users reset passwords accordingly.
It would have been nice to have an email. Had I gone to bed before the outage occured, I might not have known for some time that there were any issues.
The long and the short of it is, if you subscribe to Virgin Media for broadband etc, log in and change your password. They might not bother to tell you.