Re: Virgin Media Technical Support - a Cautionary Tale, and a question

"Martin D. Pay" <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:07k3v2t5atudmghfc3m5mm1k4960cjkc7t@xxxxxxxxxx
I have a friend who after many years as an NTL TV-and-broadband
customer just upgraded his Virgin Media broadband subscription,
to their new 10MB service. An engineer duly came and installed a
cable modem, apparently necessary for 10MB...

And then the problems started! To cut a very long story short, my
friend could access the broadband service on his wife's laptop
but not on his desktop PC (both running Win XP). No router
involved - he just swapped the cable over between the 2 machines
(a router comes later, when I go and set it up for him). The only
thing that VM's ex-NTL technical support drones in India could
suggest from reading their scripts was to 'delete the TCP/IP
stack as it was obviously faulty' (although this of course isn't
actually possible in Win XP, although you can 'repair' it using a
command line instruction). After 3 days of frustration he finally
managed to get through to someone at VM in the UK, who suggested
he install a new NIC in his PC as the one on his Asus motherboard
might have failed. He duly trotted down to PC World (I know!) and
spent £15 on a NIC and £30 on a new 15-metre Belkin Cat6 cable to
replace the Cat5e one that had been in service between set-top
box and PC since he originally signed up to NTL's half-megabit
service several years back.

so Pace STB originally? 10 Mbps half duplex only, and may not have been
Cat5.

When he got home, he decided to swap
out the old cable from the modem to his PC, as the simplest
option not requiring that he open the case - and voila! he
instantly had a working connection on both desktop and laptop...

Did the new modem come with a new cable? (AFAIR my new Samsung STB was
different RJ-45 socket to the Pace, and the old cable wouldnt work).

There are several ways of wiring RJ-45 connectors, and a miswired cable
might marginally work with a port on 1 device, but not on another.

maybe 1 PC interface is "auto crossover" and the other isnt? (or he might
have 10/100/1000 ports which dont care for some). If so, replace the cable
with one crossed (or not) and both devices will work (but 1 at a time as
another poster mentioned).

and if he had had a modem - then there would have been enough ethernet ports
to try different combinations before getting all upset.....

I guess there are several morals to this story:

Don't assume that just because a cable works with one PC it will
work with a different one. I would love to know the reason the
original cable suddenly only worked with the laptop but not with
the desktop machine, where it had worked with both the previous
day (yes, before the engineer's visit)

Never assume that a company's technical support staff always know
what they're talking about

Don't buy your parts from PC World!

i would suggest one - which is start from the basics, and check the
instructions before trying complicated fixes........

Martin D. Pay
Not a cable broadband user - but who would be genuinely
interested if anyone can offer a sensible explanation for the
sudden anomaly in the behaviour of the original cable...
--
Regards

stephen_hope@xxxxxxxxxxxx - replace xyz with ntl


.

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