Image via WikipediaI’ve been experiencing a couple of day of infuriating disconnections from our Virgin media (rebranded NTL) cable based Internet connection. During periods of connectivity I’d managed to look on-line and see that I was not alone.
Before the desperation of trying to embark on the tortuous process that is technical support on the phone I decided to do some troubleshooting myself using my own slightly sad but sometimes useful technical abilities.
I was having to unplug and restart the cable modem up to 10 times a day so the problem needed diagnosing. I noticed that during periods where there were seemingly devoid of an Internet connection I could ping Virgin’s two DNS servers so that suggested to me that perhaps this was some kind of DNS resolution issue.
I then input Virgin’s DNS servers manually into our netgear router & also made sure that the ethernet mac address showing was that of our main computer and not the router after reading that people using routers were having more problems that those where the modem was connected directly to a computer. I had also tried removing the router from the equation but the problem persisted.
So I then dispensed with Virgin’s DNS server addresses and used the third party OpenDNS server addresses input manually into the netgear router and this seems to have resolved our connection reliability issues completely.
If you’re using Virgin’s cable broadband and having similar issues it’s worth trying this solution to see if it also solves your own intermittent connection problems. Many Virgin media cabled areas are experiencing connectivity issues. In some cases it’s the local exchange, in others it’s faulty modems which can be replaced but for us using an alternative DNS service has improved our connection 100%.
4 Comments
July 23, 2008 at 6:40 pm
A while back we tried to sign up for Virgin broadband when there was a special offer going. Our details were taken and we were told that they would have to get wayleave from our landlord but that as this was a borough council there wasn’t usually any problem. That was months ago. They never got back to us.
I recently saw an advert in the tube in which Virgin was apologizing to customers for the recent spate of bad service, confirmed by you.
All in all, I am glad they somehow lost my application…
July 23, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Hi ST.Same thing happened years ago at our previous address because they couldn’t get the wayleave permission needed but never got back to us (we had to follow it up independently).Admittedly we’ve had few problems until now and had no real choice other than broadband via cable as we’re too far from an ADSL exchange. If only it was possible as in other countries to get ADSL via a phone line without having to pay a standing charge for a phone line to BT (I don’t need a phone line).Luckily I’ve solved our problems myself but the less technically minded will be stuck in a queue of buck passing (and could be affected by different issues than us). Anyone affected should record the number of days of disruption and can ask for a discount. My experience in helping others is that almost everyone will experience problems at some time no matter which ISP they’re with (the usual Brit postcode lottery applies). It’s just that kind of thing.
September 15, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Had the exact same problem and tried the exact same remedies but for me it hasn’t worked (Open DNS).
The morons at VM keep telling me to connect directly to the modem but the fault is so intermittent it’s going to take me days to diagnose the problem.
Anyway, found a tonne of errors on the modem so you may want to try this:
- Connect directly to modem and get a valid 80 \ 81 address.
- Goto 192.168.100.1 and log into the modem with username: ‘root’ and password: ‘root’
-From here navigate to the Event Log which may help you.
STILL continuing to monitor the problem after 3 months and STILL no joy with Virgin Media.
If it wasn’t for the excellent TV service an my lack of BT phone line I would ditch them tomorrow.
ARRGGGHHHHH…..
September 15, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Hello Rambo-thanks for that. I had done the modem query thing and like you got lots of errors though I’m told that restarting the modem pulls up a long list of errors often dating back over a very long period. I had a few more dropped times despite OpenDNS and my modem was eventually replaced after a technicians visit which followed me sending off the readout from the modem query to VM’s email support- though VM seemed reluctant to replace it initially (didn’t even get a wholly new one) . I’ve had no great problems since then but still here that many others do.
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