Virgin Media deletes customers
Database purge leads to lengthy outages
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
A purge of unregistered cable modems by Virgin Media, part of a records clean-up, has left hundreds of customers without internet access for up to 10 days.
The programme has been running without problems since February, but in the last two weeks has hit active customers using old hardware.
Virgin Media has been trawling its databases of MAC addresses for devices not matched to registered accounts. A technical glitch caused modems issued by NTL to be frozen out of the network.
Customers wrongly affected by the purge should call customer services to have their modem manually restored to the database. Some have been sent new modems.
A Virgin Media spokesman apologised for the errors and said today: "The vast majority of affected modems were end of life or no longer in service due to disconnected accounts.
"A small percentage of unregistered modems were in use by customers, however due to incomplete records inherited from previous guises of the company, identifying these customers was impossible. The process to reactivate valid customer modems had been running smoothly until about a week ago, when a technical issue meant re-activation was delayed."
He said the technical glitch has been resolved and that staff are working through the backlog of customers disconnected in error.
Customers had speculated that the programme was part of efforts to battle illegal modem cloners, but the firm denied this, saying it merely aimed to spruce its records. ®
COMMENTS
Suck it and see
"A small percentage of unregistered modems were in use by customers, however due to incomplete records inherited from previous guises of the company, identifying these customers was impossible."
Perhaps I'm being unneccesarily cynical, but sounds as if they've taken the attitude that the easiest/cheapest way to resolve this was to disconnect them and wait for the the ones that were "live" to ring in and complain.
Nice.
Neccesarily Cynical
They use that philosophy for everything else, so i don't see why this should be any different.
Lower their prices accross the board... keep everyone on the same price they were on and lower it only if they ring up and complain.
byebye freetards....
the NTL accounts management were a joke, many customers billing details and even existance having been lost in the process....
their old accounts handling system was soo full of holes, but then thats what you get when you have hundreds of monkeys pounding away on keyboards in a different time and language zone.
so it looks like they have dumped everyone who has gotten away with it till now and also taken out a lot of actual paying customers.
oh well the real paying ones will kick up a fuss and come back into the billing system shortly.
the real freetards will switch to the neighbours wifi connections...
good job i got away with only 18months free service,
god you gotta love them monthly refunds (when they get out of control)
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Data control in the cloud
