It was only recently that Virgin Media was caught accidentally e-mailing users of various speed tiers, a mail informing them that they would all be upgraded to Virgin's new 120Mbps service, that had been intended only for 100Mbps customers, leading to user confusion.
This time around, between 5pm and 8pm on the 17th, various Virgin Media users suffered from a large, three hour, country-wide blackout, which the firm claims was caused by a "routing issue". Despite Virgin's claims that their "engineers quickly fixed the problem and [that] service was restored before 8pm," some users are still reporting problems with their connections, with Virgin's advice being to power down their modems and wait five minutes before powering back on.
On a more positive note, it turned out that despite the firm's mangling of 120Mbps upgrade e-mails, 50Mbps users will also be receiving the new 120Mbps service, which is expected to fully roll-out by mid-2013, whilst 100Mbps users will witness a price cut to level out the two tiers, "We originally announced that 50Mb would be uplifted to 100Mb, however in additional good news we have now confirmed that we will also uplift 50Mb customers to 120Mb. Due to the way the network upgrades and the new 120Mb tier will roll-out, customers will go to 100Mb first and then see a further uplift to 120Mb. All at no extra cost," stated Virgin Media head of consumer media relations, Asam Ahmad.
It will be interesting to observe how the speed of fibre internet evolves over the next few years, with BT promising 300Mbps by spring this year. Whilst BT's network is still very much in the process of expansion, at some point Virgin Media will have no choice but to up its game.
Edit: Added quote from Asam confirming the move to 120Mb for 50Mb customers.
