Rant at Virgin Media

When I lived with my parents 4yrs ago, we had NTL cable TV + broadband.  It was cool.  4yrs Ago, I moved in with my girlfriend and wanted the same service, but Telewest served my new flat so I took out a good TV package, phone & broadband!

It's a nice package, and to be honest, I'd never had a problem.   3 Months ago, we started getting leaflets & post telling us that Telewest was merging with NTL to create Virgin Media, a conglomerate to take on Sky.

2 Months ago, the whole Sky vs Virgin Media thing appeared in the papers.. Neither firm could settle on a pricing scheme.  To be fair, from what I've read, Sky are taking the piss a bit, but still, never-the-less, we've now lost Sky One, and a few other channels, but that's not important!

Tuesday night, I was at home, having a game of Worms on my 360 when I had the "disconnected from Xbox Live"  message.. How strange.   I didn't pay any attention to it though. 

Yesterday, I jumped on my PC to download some photo's.  I got 10% through the download and then it failed.  Turns out my Internet went down.  My suspicions immediately went to my 'webstar' modem provided by Telewest.

I pulled the power on it, and turned it back on and the Internet worked.. Hoorah!

10 minutes later, it broke again.  A quick reset and i was back online... for another 10 minutes.  At this point, i was quite angry. I was trying to download this 70mb file of high quality pictures from my girlies brother's 21st birthday!  As you can imagine, every time my modem went to sleep, this download would fail!!!

So I phoned up Virgin Media.  And went through the same ol' script support.  "Can you switch off your computer and restart it for me please" and "Can we check the network connections please".  I had done all this already but you have to go through the motions. 

When I first spoke to the man on the phone, i said i think the Modem had packed up as it was disconnecting me after 10 minutes of use.  He said it wouldn't be that and carried on umming and aarring about the problem.

Eventually, after 45mins on the phone, he agreed that it was either my Modem that had gone barmy, or my wireless router... But get this.  Because I didn't purchase my wireless router from Telewest, they can't help me with the problem at all?

Even though, my wireless router (a netgear one) was from a Telewest promotion where they provided some customers with a free wireless router + setup disc.  Unfortunately i wasn't one of these customers, but i did purchase one from eBay.

So even though I've purchased an official Telewest branded netgear router from a 3rd party (second hand), and I've set it up using Telewest setup instructions, they cant help me!..

How ridiculous is that? 

So it's been left that it's either the router or the modem.  So what i've done is plugged my Webstar Modem straight into the PC (so i cant access the net via my Xbox or my Laptop) and see if that changes... I'm pretty sure i'll have the same problem, but I'm away this weekend so hopefully, any problems would have sorted themselves out by Sunday night...

Here's hoping anyway!