Never mind the last mile

THE LAST mile between a subscriber and the telephone exchange is no longer vital. According to Virgin Media it is the last ten metres that matter.

An INQ reader has been trying for three months to get a fixed telephone line and broadband out of the newly renamed Virgin Media.

After the INQ intervened he has finally been informed that he's ten metres away from the Virgin network and that "the network is not being expanded right now."

The INQ's understanding is that a cable duct has collapsed and it's uneconomical to make the repair to connect just one subscriber. That wouldn't matter so much, perhaps, if Virgin Media hadn't started to charge him for a non-existent service.

In total, our reader was given a total of four installation dates, one of which was after he'd been assured the necessary 'construction work' to get him connected had taken place.

The INQ has fed his postcode into Virgin Media's broadband checker and, yes, it still says his house is covered.

By contrast, BT has completed the installation of a phone line in just under a week after the order was placed. Now all he has to do is wait for the broadband.

This isn't the only complaint the INQ has received about some parts of the network Virgin Media has inherited. A female INQ reader had to sign up to Gmail because her Blueyonder address disappeared for 36 hours.

Again, the INQ checked the web site and found that there was 'planned maintenance'. This should have taken 12 hours but the timings given on the notice showed that the outage would last for 14 hours at least.

The most irate reader was complaining about Virgin Media's new "traffic punishment" scheme for those on its 20 Mbit/s service. Should you download more than 3GB between 4pm and midnight your bandwidth is reduced to 5 Mbit/s once you exceed and it is then restored to 20 at midnight.

"It's basically a daily cap, rather than a monthly cap," he moaned.

They've already been reports that Virgin Media just might be damaging the Virgin brand and Sir Richard is a tad unhappy. Especially since he's the largest stakeholder in the company. µ

L'INQ
Virgin Media