Broadband

Virgin having another outage. They have posted on Twitter :rage:

It’s all very situational. In Sheffield my VM service was fantastic, I’d have connected there in heartbeat. In Nottm, it’s a shitshow. During lockdown you could set your watch by the times when the connection would drop out completely.

I don’t know if that’s down to differences in the standards of infrastructure laid in the 90s (Sheffield’s would have been Yorkshire Cable whereas Nottingham had Diamond Cable - you still see their logo all over the place on pavements and whatnot, along with some NTL here and there) or just some areas being more oversubscribed than others.

Perhaps it’s all different if you get FTTP with them now, I don’t know - if they have an offer which is competitive I might try it.

I have BT halo so if my broadband goes down it automatically switches to using the EE network.

Always thought it was a bit overkill but maybe not with what we’re seeing with Virgin Media.

My 500mbps contract (up from 150mbps) started as of today and I’m getting the full whack. Don’t have Halo as I use my own router which is much better than that BT supply. Not had any internet downtime in the two years I’ve been a BT customer at my current address.

I have read about this just now. It is an interesting set up unfortunately it is not available at my address.

Virgin Media issues affected us at work early this morning for several hours, then again in the afternoon.

Looks like it’s our turn. Although it could just be me. Some rogue network has been scanning mine for open ports for weeks now, perhaps they’ve progressed to a DOS. Whilst up it’s heavily contested or congested. There some spikes on the public blip graph but no incidents reported (as yet).

All good here so looks like something local to you.

Port 80/443 scanning has ramped up in the past few days - fail2ban is blocking 5 or 6 addresses per day at the moment as opposed to just 1 or 2.

Just noticed that my Debian box’s syslog is showing a possible SYN flood on port 443 but that was yesterday.

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I’m surprised your workplace uses such a incompetent provider in the first place tbh.

Surprisingly Virgin Media claim 99.9% reliability :person_shrugging:

That’s not that impressive. Means they go down for an average of 45 minutes per month, or 9 hours per year.

Depends what exactly constitutes uptime for them as well, which determines how they calculate it.

Business customers will probably get an SLA though, and compensation when it’s not met. It’ll typically be higher than 99.9% as well. Even 4 9s is considered poor these days. A big business will be expecting 6 or more. It’ll require onsite redundancy to achieve though.

A big business will expect 0.3 seconds of downtime a year as an SLA? Jeez.

Your math is a bit off! 6 nines is about 30seconds downtime per year. Probably confusing it with 8, but you count the nines preceding the decimal too.

Not necessarily big either. Quite a few of our clients are in this bracket in terms of what they need and their affordability.

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Where I work our provider is also 99.9% but definitely more reliable than Virgin :joy:

You’re likely not missing much. I was with BT and there offered their Halo 2 product whilst I was having Openreach line problems. I tried it and BT (EE) ran like a dog at 5 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up!

VM customer service is awful but their service is fine, cheap with VOLT and on the rare occasions it goes down, I just tether.