Service Status Phone Line and problems

[bertJ]

After yet another broadband failure I tried to phone the Virgin Media status line on 0800 561 0061 last night to find that it doesn't seem to exist anymore. Instead I was directed to the 25p/minute line. In desperation I did this and was told that there was no network failure in my area. He agreed that there was a fault (no sync or rdy light) and would arrange a service call, the earliest being in a week's time! To be fair he agreed that the phone call cost would be refunded.
About 2 hours later the connection came back so there must have been a network problem. I then checked service status on the web page but found no mention of my area.
This is the third time in two months that this has happened. Engineers came out twice and, of course, found no fault.
I'm almost at the point of dumping Virgin and having a BT line installed at a cost of £130 (the original line was chopped years ago - long story!)
I'd appreciate any constructive comments.

[evil_fatneck]

I'm also on the point of chucking in Virgin Media, and I haven't even done 12 months with them yet so no idea how well that will go down. My problem is slightly different - DNS seems to be the main issue. Even signing in to this site just now timed out twice.

Email is fine, download speeds are fine, counter-strike: source pings are fine, ftp is fine, in fact everything bar browsing is fine and as good as it ever was with Telewest.

Browsing is just a joke however, at random times during the day it slows to worse than 56k speeds and when it hits about 6.00pm then forget it for a few hours. Switching to OpenDNS doesn't really help, and my pc is clean from all spyware, viruses and all that yada yada.

Does anyone ACTUALLY KNOW what is going on with VM and their DNS, because this is simply not good enough. ADSL is looking a lot more tempting it must be said, and as the 2Mb line is only a tenner a month I'll probably just run them both until VM runs out. Sorry to not answer your question and jump all over your thread, but its probably all related one way or another.

Cheers.

[waldopepper]

Yeh I've had weirdness with various sites and download speeds for a couple of weeks or so and I had no idea about the traffic shaping. I've spent hours troubleshooting my PC, the router, modem etc and it now looks as though I have been wasting my time.

I sat there monitoring download speeds last night just before and after midnight and it quadrupled (from 20Kb/s) in size after 12 (to 80Kb/s) from one site so I guess I'm being shaped. Not sure why because I can't see how I would download that much and I certainly won't be spending money on their support line to find out why.

That aside though certain websites seem very slow whatever time of day and I'm sure there's a bigger problem with Virgin Media lately.