Getting a new Cable Modem

Early this year my cable broadband, nominally 20 Mb/s, slowed down to about 2% of that. It was sometimes even slower - I once measured a download speed as low as 13 kp/s, although upload speeds were usually roughly what they were supposed to be.

I therefore had to communicate with Virgin Media. I assume that ‘Virgin' does not refer to the sexual inexperience of the owners or employees of the company. Possibly it signifies a subliminal recognition of their ineptitude in helping customers.

Fist I tried the telephone help line. At least it was free, but I had to deal with a series of menus prefaced by long winded recorded explanations, before I was allowed to listen to half an hour of recorded music while I awaited for Angel in India to answer the phone and tell me to do what I'd already done - reset the modem and wireless router, and plug a computer directly into the modem. Eventually I seemed to lose Angel.

I then tried to send Virgin an email.

Emails have to be sent through a special hard to locate page of the Virgin web site. One has to enter one's autobiography in a set of little boxes, and has to repeat the procedure every time one sends a message.

The messages have to be entered into a tiny window that one can't resize, so that one can't proofread the message before sending it . The size of the window doesn't limit the length of the message, just the part one can see at any time.

Messages are supposed to be attended to within 48 hours. After waiting considerably longer than that I eventually spotted a reply in the spam trap. All emails from the Virgin help staff go into the spam trap.

The message told me to perform various tests, and referred me to various web pages for further explanation but none of the references was a correct url, so it took me quite a while to find them.

The tests were quite inappropriate to my problem of an exceptionally low connection. They wanted me to record three trace routes to the BBC site; my connection was so slow that the process timed out without finishing, closing the MSDOS window, so I had nothing to copy. They wanted me simultaneously to download four large files in case downloading a single file didn't use the full capacity of the connection, but even if four files had used four times as much capacity as one, that would in my case have still be only four times two percent.

Eventually I managed to record three incomplete trace routes, and sent the results to Virgin. Trying to reply to their email drew the response that my message hadn't been delivered, because I hadn't sent it from the Virgin site, so I had to cut and paste into the silly little box, thus losing the message header.

The response was a message identical to the one I'd just replied to. So I resent my previous readings, prefaced by a protest.

I then progressed to a different, but still Spam trapped, request for information. This time they told me how to log in to the modem configuration file. I didn't confine myself to the fields they asked me to look at, but looked at everything, and found the suggestive words:

'Software update failed'

I considered that a CLUE, and emphasised it by putting it at the very beginning of my reply (sent through the little box, of course), and suggested they replace the very old ntl modem.

The Virgin response ignored everything I'd said; it was simply a repetition of the request I'd just answered.

After copying my previous reply into the little box, with expressions of discontent, I tried another telephone call. This time I got through quite quickly to a different lady in India who looked at my account and said 'The reason your Broadband is slow is that you have a very old modem that is not capable of handling the present service. I have ordered you a new modem, it will arrive in two days'

It did, accompanied by a complementary plastic spanner to help fix it, and it works. hence my jubilation. The whole process had taken about two months.

Did the various other people who were supposed to be dealing with the problem fail to notice the modem was out of date? Did they not bother to check, or did they just not exist ? Perhaps they were experiments in AI.

Incidentally, anyone wanting to investigate their modem should follow these instructions:

Using a computer plugged directly into the modem, point the browser at 192.168.100.1 This should take you to that Virgin's message calls the modem's Configuration page. Click on

the Login link and enter "root" as both the username and the password. Then read the horrid truth.