OT: Virgin

[Bill]

In message , Richard Colton writes

Well maybe there are differences in different areas, but my 3 support calls on behalf of this friend were dealt with by

1. a man who gave us his direct dial in number and when we chatted about where he was and where we were, we discussed whether he could do foreigners and call in on his way home. We got it sorted, so we didn't discuss this further.
2. a man who might have been foreign, but with excellent English who did a test from his end, took control of the router and couldn't get it to load later drivers either. He arranged the replacement.
3. another man who sounded English who, when I had trouble following the instructions sent out with the new router, confirmed that following the instructions was not the way forward and stayed on the line until I got it going.

Maybe I was lucky. My own experiences with Demon have not been as good as this.

As for whether Virgin is Virgin, I don't care. If it's branded Virgin, I think of a screwed up rail system, and start from that base.

[Mark]

too many Virgins

?Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Entertainment Investment Holdings Limited owns a _minority holding_ of 21413099 Virgin Media common stock as of December 2009, ...?

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[Lobster]

I know about the traffic management thing; but don't know what you mean about them blocking Usenet: I've been using their server at news.virginmedia.com for years, essentially without problems.

David

[Richard Colton]

Ex Telewest here. I suppose it does depend on what you do with the connection, but if you are a heavy torrent or usenet user, then it may be better to consider someone else.

Also, anyone wanting to move to VM had better have a read of this:

> We do by somewhat unusual means have access to ADSL thats a claimed 8

The problem is that the service is being eroded quite rapidly. Support used to be onshore, Telewest used to run two news servers (ok, the binary server was always a bit flaky) one of which was fast with good retention and strictly text only. The support newsgroups were good, generally well staffed and with a prompt response - these are now long gone and replaced with an online forum where dissenting posts can quietly disappear and the response times seem to vary between weeks and eaons.

[Dave Liquorice]

million+

Differing interpretation of the words "minority holding" I think. I get the impression that all shareholders of Virgin Media are "minority holders" in that no single entity has a majority. As in the number of votes they have determines the outcome of anything put to a sherholder vote.

However the major shareholders all seem to have somewhere between 10 and 20%. Between them Virgin Enterprises Ltd and Virgin Entertainment Investment Holdings Ltd have a significant number of votes and I wouldn't be surprised if the combined holding puts them further up than 3rd. Which to me isn't really a "minority holding".

[Richard]

It may be that they don't have the binaries on their server. I am doubtful that many ISPs provide those binary groups.

[dennis]

They used to run a binary server in house. I think it went when they became Virgin. It made sense at the time as it stopped lots of people going off net to download stuff.

With the increased use of torrents having a binary news server is less advantageous anyway.

They restrict bandwidth as the cable network can't cope with lots of heavy users. Its a shared media at the subscribers end and it costs a lot to add new bits of shared media if a segment becomes overloaded.

Not like ADSL which is not shared at the subscribers end and costs peanuts to add new subscriber modules.

Both may have choke points deeper in the network and that varies from ISP to ISP. SKY have vast amounts of spare bandwidth in their network (its easy to max out my 18M adsl link on Sky from almost any source at any time of the day. I could probably do it 24x7 if there was anything worth doing it for). ;)

[Mark]

I don?t see Virgin Enterprises Limited listed as a ?Share holder

Virgin Entertainment Investment Holdings is listed as only having 4.8% share

or were you looking at Virgin Media Investment Holdings Limited which is the top tier company for Virgin Media, Virgin Mobile, which was NTL Investment Holdings before the branding change, and not part of the Mr Bs Virgin group.

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