Virgin Broadband – not flying quite so high

Well, this is embarrassing. Right in the middle of an major advertising campaign to promote the new Virgin Money banking service and basing their main sales pitch on their ’40 years of excellence’, Virgin Media’s broadband and cable customers weren’t quite so satisfied with Mr Branson last week.

A UK wide failure of their ADSL broadband and FTH cable service left millions of customers, both residential and commercial, with no Internet access at all for many hours.

The blackout occurred right in the middle of the peak surfing time in the late afternoon and was apparently the result of a routing hardware fault. Virgin refused to say how many of its 5 million customers were affected but many industry blogs claimed that it was a nationwide issue. Virgin Media’s broadband network tends to focus on major towns and cities and doesn’t offer much coverage in rural areas.

Bad timing

In a double-whammy of ‘bad timing’, the outage comes just days after Virgin announced that it would apparently be turning up the speed on its broadband service. While it might have been frustrating for domestic users, the impact to businesses would have been substantially more.

Smart businesses know just how much a big outage like this can affect day to day operations, even if it’s just a short-term blip. Disruption in communications between customers and suppliers is inevitable, as is stress and frustration for staff. 

For mission critical systems and sites, the option of a satellite broadband back-up that runs parallel to the main telecoms infrastructure is a truly worthwhile option. While this involves a small initial outlay, it would certainly save money and embarrassment in the event of an ‘outage’. It’s always wise to have a ‘plan B’ just in case plan A proves to be a little less secure than you first thought. (More about satellite broadband for fail-over.)

Try turning it off and on again…!

Virgin Media issued the usual apology that’s standard practice in these situations, a spokesperson saying that:

“Our customers may have experienced some problems getting online yesterday evening. Our engineers quickly fixed the problem and service was restored by 8pm. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

However, customers who tried to contact Virgin reported that they could not get through because of the high volume of calls to its customer service lines. The great British sense of humour kicked in, and many customers vented their frustration on Twitter (once the system came back online, of course) by suggesting that Virgin should ‘try turning it off and on again’.

Without the slightest hint of irony, Virgin then immediately advised customers experiencing problems to do precisely that – suggesting that ‘powering down your router for five minutes and then turning it back on’ would help.

While Virgin Media’s does have fair reputation as a provider of high speed broadband that’s (usually!) fairly stable, it just goes to show that even the mightiest fall occasionally, and that broadband outages are still prevalent. Once again, and particularly for businesses, the option of a satellite broadband system is one that can fill in those ‘blips’ in supply and keep your business running, when all around you is falling apart.

We’ve come to rely on technology so much in the 21st Century that when the machine stops, as E.M. Forster once wrote, we are practically helpless and cannot continue to function in our daily lives. Perhaps as our reliance on technology becomes ever more deeply ingrained in our lives and businesses, it really is time to start thinking seriously about that ‘plan B’.

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