Bah. After years with Telewest, during which the broadband Internet service was pretty damn good, a few days of Virgin being in full control and I’m tearing my hair out.

An outage yesterday – when I actually had a free day to go on the net in the hours of daylight – had me disassembling my PC and mixing up the network connection to my switch because I first assumed my PC was at fault. Then I thought that I had stopped ithe connection working by changing the network cards’ connections to the switch so I randomised these again, then forgot what was connected to what when I started .

Someone phoned up Virgin for me and found that there was an official outage with another 4 hours to go. So my PC had been fine till I started trying to fix it…..

When I phoned up after the official four hours I got an unremittingly chirpy recording that suggested that I reboot my PC and the cable box. Obviously I had tried this about 8 hours earlier, and several times since. But I tried again. Nothing.

This morning, there was still nothing. I came back at 7:30 pm and still had nothing but this time I made my PC reconfigure its network settings and drop its IP & gateway etc. and I connected the PC directly to the cable modem box. (Goodbye, switch. It looks like one PC at a time from now on.) It worked.

Elated, I got online for at least 40 minutes, before the service decided it was too much trouble to keep connected to the Internet and switched off again for five minutes. I have no idea how long it will stay on now.

Losing Sky One is one thing, there are always other alternatives.. (Thanks to Nullfidian for the link to Virgin’s page that explains what TV there will be.) A crappy broadband service would be completely different. It might be a pure coincidence that there happened to be a local service failure in this area at the start of Virgin’s control. I will give them the benfit of the doubt but will be sure to watch the service closely for a while to see if it gets back to Telewest standards.