Why Dont You Blog?

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.

Recently there have been lots of problems with 1and1 and their mail servers. As a 1and1 customer (this site is hosted on a 1and1 server), I have been unable to get reliable email delivery for the last three days. I have tried sending an email to customer services (well…), I have tried using their online contact forms and I have scoured their home page for information on the outage. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing to tell me if it is my problem or their problem, no idea of how long it wil last or any possible solutions.

Fortunately today I found an article on the Register where 1and1 make the following statement:

Yesterday, a number of UK customers experienced some delay in receiving inbound email. The delay was due to a surge in email volumes over our email servers. Our email system continued to receive all email during this time, with only its delivery to inboxes being delayed.

The email delay was handled according to set procedure, emails were queued and stored and no email was lost during this time.

The technical issue was resolved and all emails involved are being delivered safely. Only 1&1 email users were affected.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused to our customers due to the queuing of emails.

Today, 1&1’s UK Customer Control Panel was temporarily unavailable for a very short time whilst systems were maintained.

Now, correct me if I am wrong, but are customers of 1and1 now expected to have to search the Register to find out about service outages and problems? Not only that, but the problem was certainly in place before yesterday and as of 1815 hours (GMT) today it was not fixed.

I am truly amazed that 1&1 thinks it can demonstrate such an appaling level of customer service. Why is there no server status or service information page?

Sadly, given the consumer apathy prevalent in the UK, I suspect they will still be “top webhost” this year.