Virgin.net scam

[Andy Wardley]

Matt Jones wrote:
> Would you believe it, the morning after I post the above I come
> downstairs to find myself with no internet access?
> Unbe-fucking-lievable.

I've heard many terrible things about NTL and their support in 
particular.  However, in 5+ years I've only ever had 2 outages, both
lasting a couple of hours.

First time my call ended up in India where a hapless support person 
insisted that I reboot my machine and my router.  I knew it was a 
problem with the cable ('cos the NTL-provided TV was off too) but I 
played along and pretended to follow all the steps so that they could 
eventually put me through to the right person.  Problem solved in a few
hours.

Second time (a few weeks back), I rung the support line, selected the 
last option (report a line fault) and got through to a "proper" 
engineer.  He not only understood what I was talking about, but also 
recognised that *I* knew what I was talking about and didn't need my 
hand holding through yet another computer reboot.  He tapped some 
buttons, told me yes, their mumble-mumble-router-box-central-doodah was 
down and due to be fixed before 6.21pm that evening (it was currently 
about 3).  It was back up by 5.

So despite their reputation and all the bad things I hear about them, I 
have to admit that I've been very happy (or is that "lucky"?) with them.

A