Virgin Media says sorry over Superhub snafu

Virgin Media has apologised to customers who have been struggling with its newly issued, but horribly flaky router/modem combo box, which has somewhat unfortunately been dubbed the "Superhub" by the cable company.

"We are working closely with our hardware partner Netgear to resolve a reliability issue that has crept into a recent firmware update for our SuperHub," a Virgin Media spokesman said in a statement to The Register.

"Firmware updates are issued regularly to address reported problems, ensure compatibility with new services or to add new functionality. Unfortunately, a change made within the latest update has led to some customers seeing speeds affected whilst using certain applications.

"We have now identified the issue and are creating updated beta firmware for customers to test, which will be issued to our beta-test group within the next 24 hours. We anticipate this will resolve the problems these customers have been seeing, and expect full distribution of the new firmware by the end of the week. We're sorry for the inconvenience."

Indeed, readers have told us that Virgin Media released the latest firmware update (R26) to its beta testers last night. And here it is.

"My first impressions are certainly very promising – unaware of any changes this evening I was streaming for 25 minutes without issue until suddenly realising what I was doing and that it was the first time in weeks that I'd been able to listen to music uninterrupted," Reg reader Richard told us.

"It was then I logged into the forums and my own router and saw VM had pushed an update to R26. Of course, such a brief test does not a solution make, but I'd say that VM are suddenly moving very quickly on this issue ..."

Richard added that he wondered if our story from yesterday had anything to do with the sudden brisk activity over at Virgin Media Towers.

Surely not? ®