London time??
What the fuck is 'London time'??
GMT, surely
Virgin Media subscribers are complaining that their TiVo set-top boxes are randomly and repeatedly restarting in what appears to be a widespread service disruption. Lots of Brits posting to the UK cableco's support forum say the TV boxes, provided by Virgin Media, being thrown into reboot loops. The issue appears to have …
In the U.K. there is only London when it comes to news.
Example,
Snow in the North nothing on the news, Snow in London - catastrophe, cats living with dogs, end of the world apocalypse.
Someone farts in public in London - Outrage, Fart in the North - Comment about too much gravy.
In the U.K. there is only London when it comes to news.
One third of the population of the UK lives or works inside the M25. London produces roughly half the taxes for the UK.
If you want us to become independent, a la Singapore, just say the word.
(Queue the downvotes from the UKIP types I guess....)
how about downvotes for made up statistics internet bullshit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London
in 2011 8 million in greater london.
same year, there were 53 million in England, 10 more in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom
so you're not even close to accurate.15% of the country live in london. less than 13% of the uk.
so thats living in london. to go from 8 to a third of 63 the population of the UK, you're telling me there is a 13 million person influx into london on a daily basis? no wonder southwestern trains are a mess.
show me where you got the stat from and i'll take it as valid.
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Give the rest of us a referendum to separate from the south-east, and I suspect you'd be on your own by Christmas. There'd be a reduction of support for Scottish Independence from the reduced rUK too, since most of the dissatisfaction up here is with you lot down there hogging all the pies.
"One third of the population of the UK lives or works inside the M25."
So? A fairly large chunk of the land mass inside the M25 isn't part of the GLA. Most of my work is in York but I don't really give a stuff about Yorks "local" news so what makes you think commuters care more for London news than the news for where they live?
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I quite like the names they give their vans.
Don't let the cable companies have any control over the software. My Tivo has none of these problems, because I bought it so I am getting TIvo's software. It isn't perfect, a couple years ago it would restart randomly about once a month until the next software update (typically they have two major updates a year) but I'd be livid if mine was restarting every 60 seconds. I have just the Tivo and one TV, so I'd be unable to watch or record anything if this was happening!
I know, I know, Tivo doesn't have Apple's market power so they need to appease the cable companies by giving them control of the software for branding, etc. The problem is this will damage Tivo's brand as a lot of Virgin subscribers who have this problem on their Tivo but not on other non-Tivo STBs will blame Tivo and have a permanently bad opinion of them when it is Virgin's fault.
No.
I was on the phone with them - they have a routing clusterf*** of some sort. The initial blame was on a CMTS, but I suspect that it is not.
The time for the Tivo 100% fault correlates to the time when the VPN from my house to my VM in the cloud packed up. The CMTS fault was logged later, but I would not be surprised that it is the wrong thing to blame.
I had some giggles when talking to the guy as I was standing in front of (a different provider's) CMTS at that exact moment and it just had a fit and dropped its default for a while :)
If the latest TiVo boxes are anything like the original Series 1 TiVos (mine still going strong after 15 years) it's standard procedure to reboot in the event of an upstream failure - in the case of the S1 it will reboot if it's not receiving a TV signal (the assumption being the encoder, decoder or some other part of the chain has crashed/locked up). It's an extreme, but pragmatic, solution for a problem that happens very rarely.
If some part of the Virgin network or cable system is down this could easily explain the behaviour of the box which will keep rebooting until normal service is restored.
My next door neighbour came round last night and asked me to look at her VM setup. The Tivo was endlessly rebooting as has been well documented here.
I quickly re-routed one of my FreeSat feeds into her home and let her borrow my spare PVR.
I left her happy.
I fully expect that she'll be an ex VM customer by the end of the week. She is more than welcome to share my FreeSat.
The postie has just been with yet another 'Buy my super reliable Cable' plea from VM. I'm having a Barbie over the weekend. Guess what I'll be using to light it?
Posting A/C simply becuse I'm fed up with being bombarded with crap from VM. Who knows, they might be able to tack me down from my El Reg name.
You can't split satellite antenna signals, each tuner (so two for most PVRs and one for a general receiver) needs an individual connection to the LNB. If you're in adjoining properties all you need is another cable down from the LNB on the front of the dish. I understand that most satellite installers fitting PVRs these days don't bother with dual output LNBs and just fit a quad as standard, so there are generally two spare outputs available for future use (or sharing with the neighbors). I'd also put an earth strap on the cable as well, just in case.
Stuff like this is just plain crazy.
Why don't they basically just build a pc and stream in the same way that other online services do (eg bbc iPlayer) ... they could free up move bandwidth for use to the broadband provision and only have to deal with a single means of data handling on their network.
VM have great broadband imo but their TV service is just plain broken ... like why series links not start the recording when the show starts like sky does?
I'm tempted to drop my TV and just have the broadband.
@Wardy01
Because that would mean they needed to implement multicast properly - and their techs haven't heard about it yet...
Their network is pretty much the perfect environment for testing this kind of solution - but since the existing system works (sort-of) they stick with it
Yeh there's a thought @John Robson ... a network op that can't run a network properly ... jeez!
It boggles the mind what speeds they might achieve if they used the whole lot of that bandwidth for data only then just piped secure content connections down it.
Sorry about having some common sense here .... I know it's unprecedented!
I wonder if it was connected?
It started at about 10am and they initially claimed it was planned maintenance (it would have been nice to warn us in advance about that but that's another issue) ending at 3pm but that deadline whooshed by and we didn't actually get any connectivity back until 8pm.
Im quite hacked off with the Virgin service recently.
the billing system update was a shambles, I was betting bills for one amount, and different amount taken from bank.
and totally wrong bill amounts too what I was meant to be billed, oh and promises of refunds that they forgot to do twice..!
the number of times I don't even have a internet service (120meg service, and cant even ping server to get speed test to run etc)
as for TV, over priced, and there is very little good content at the moment,
and I have noticed quite a few times that the on demand services are consistently off line too.
(ive not had the issue mentioned here btw with rebooting)
the router is also rubbish, I had an engineer round who advised just call and ask for latest hub (OK), did call up and got the rudest non English person who refused to give me a new hub.
im just at the end of 12 months lock in after last time they overcharged, and basically wait for you to call and complain before giving you reductions (and then locking you into 12 months),
so im off.
im going to use the money I save per year (80-90 pcm x 12) to justify buying new swanky TV with online/ondemand stuff + free view + PCR built in, and get a cheap internet provider (only).
oh and I DONT need a phone line thank you very much either, all I get is bloody sales calls on that line (and my grandparents....... what is it with grandparents not calling mobiles..?).
(ex happy customer for 15 years : since Telewest)
rant over :o)
oh and I DONT need a phone line thank you very much either, all I get is bloody sales calls on that line (and my grandparents....... what is it with grandparents not calling mobiles..?).
What, you actually plugged a phone into the line?
The only reason to plug a phone into it would be to call them when needed since the only reason to take the phone line is that most packages are (or used to be when I last looked ages ago) cheaper with it than without.
The litany of VM's clusterf@*ks continues, we have had an intermittent but ongoing Broadband problem in WA3 area since January 2015... Estimated fix date is mid August this year!!
According to the engineer who came to visit the problem is with the network cluster of 12 cabinets we route off and it needs major infrastructure works to resolve. I was told by one of their drones that these sort of repairs take time... Well yes I get that Einstein but 18 months?
I suspect that they were just leaving it carry on in the hope that customers wouldnt notice but as my wife now works from home a couple of days a week a reliable internet connection is a must and their attitude was appaling.
The gist of their customer service drone's response was 'well we will get it fixed eventually but until then you can always leave...' I expect that tactic has led a lot of people to put up with it. I went straight online the next time our internet was up and moved lock stock and barrel to SKY. And yes I know they aren't perfect but slow but reliable internet is better than it dropping out and staying off for hours at a time.