Topic: Virgin

Virgin Media has announced it's best quarterly growth for seven years, and said that it should be able to hit 5 million UK customers by the end of the decade.

The telco added a total of 24,000 new customers in the last quarter of 2007, nearly twice as many as the same time the previous year. This brings it's total number of customers to 4.8 million of which 3.7 million also take advantage of their broadband services. Customers who take advantage of more than one service rising from just over 40 per cent last year to just under 50 per cent.

Virgin Media has been suffering email problems since the beginning of this month and have had to call Microsoft in to help.

The bug affects around 10% of it's old Telewest customers and results in emails taking up to 11 hours to arrive. As it's only one of Virgin's total of eight mail clusters which is experiencing problems it seems that the situation has even got the Microsoft scratching their heads, as the only way to resolve the issue is the ever popular fix of rebooting the server.
Virgin hope that its migration to Exchange 2003, which it has sped up, should fix the problems.

Virgin Media is to due to upgrade the connection speed of customers on its 'L' package from 4Mbps up to 10Mbps from the beginning next month.

The free upgrade should be complete by the end of this summer and will be rolled out on a region-by-region basis for all of Virgins cabled areas, which it took over the merger with ntl:Telewest.

The company has also been trialling speeds of 50Mbps and these should be available to nine million homes by the end of this year, although prices haven't been announced as yet.

Virgin Media broadband users are back online again after national network problems on Monday evening.

As is usually the case the problems happened during a firmware update during routine maintenance caused routers to reset, which then cascaded as an excessive number tried to connect at the same time causing IP conflicts.

It seems that most of the problems occurred in the North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands with an estimated three million customers having problems. TV and phone services were not affected by the glitch, so it was a case of watching telly rather than surfing for many.

Virgin though seems to have played down the problem.....

Virgin Media has contracted BT Wholesale to manage its telephone switching network in a 5-year £98 million deal.

BT will also look after current support contracts with third-party suppliers on behalf Virgin Media before it's switch to VoIP. It will also mean 184 employees of Virgin being transferred to BT Wholesale for the length of the contract.

Virgin Media's voice switching network supports about a fifth of all landline phones in the UK.

Virgin Media has been rapped by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for the second time in less than a month for making false claims about its broadband service.

The claims were reported to the ASA by, as you would guess, BSkyB who said that the claimed "Superfast" speed could only be achieved in optimal conditions and also members of the public questioned the "unlimited downloads" claim of the advert.

The campaign featured TV, Radio and Internet ads which said that Virgin Media offers "Superfast 10Mb broadband - with unlimited downloads" .The ASA upheld the complaints as Virgin itself admitted that the maximum speeds could not be achieved at peak times, and the telco said that the infamous 'up to' quote had been omitted due to an oversight.

Stay tuned for next weeks Virgin vs Sky advert war.....

Virgin Media is going back to it's ntl:telewest roots after decinding it can't complete with BSkyB.

Acting chief executive Neil Berkett, in charge after the departure of Steve Burch a couple of months ago, has said that the company will forces on broadband rather than trying to take on the satellite provider in the media stakes.

He thinks that rather than providing total broadband TV services customers will be tempted by services such as video on demand that require fast broadband, which can be provided by their cable connections.
Virgin has been trialling broadband with speeds up to 50Mbps which is over twice as fast as BT ADSL2+ and six times the maximum standard ADSL connections can provide. It hopes to provide a similar service to the BBC iPlayer and provide downloadable content, and if it can provide the right kind of content then it will prove to be a winner.

As Mr Berkett says "Despite our technical advantage we are still not really standing out from the crowd,", but it's strange that after it's much hyped move into media it's now decided to do what it did originally and become a broadband cable provider again.

Virgin Media have signed a fifty event deal with M3U.com for secure satellite link to provide near live content including interviews, commentary, and fans’ views.

M3U.com encode and transmit the content over their symmetrical 1024Kbps secure connection from Virgin Media’s new mobile TV studio to Virgin Media’s own internal network. Users can then visit Virgin Media’s sports portal (www.virginmedia.com/sport) on Saturdays to watch the content, although it is archived on the site so it can be streamed for viewing at anytime.

Virgin Media's plan to put off support line callers with a premium line phone rate seems to have worked.

Unluckily for 90 workers at IBM's call centre, who handle Virgins calls, it means that they will no longer have a job. Support was outsource by Virgin in 2006 as a way of cost cutting after the merger of NTL and Telewest.

Whether the reduction is due to less calls due to customers not calling the helpline or just them deciding to hop ship to another provider will tell in time.

Chief executive of Virgin Media, Steve Burch has resigned with immediate effect from today.

Mr Burch led the firm as it was formed by the merger of NTL and Telewest, and through the takeover of Virgin Mobile, but his departure is said to be due to "family and personal reasons" and he will be returning to the US.