Reply to post:

I've had similar calling my ISP (Virgin Media at the time), to report that their DNS servers were down.

Blah, blah, reboot PC (I just waited 30s and said that I had), blah, blah, reboot router (did it, again, just because), blah, blah, cable modem test shows that it's fine. I know, but the Internet connection is not fully working because your DNS servers are not responding. Blah, blah, but the cable modem test shows an Internet connection. At this point it's like talking to a parrot, a particularly stupid parrot. Eventually I get escalated and put through to the next line who go through all the same stupid process, with the same stupid responses. After getting through to them that I really would like to speak to someone competent I eventually get passed through to someone who had a clue... Naturally, they had to follow the script but bored of this, I just cut them short and told them that I'd done this multiple times with their previous support staff and nothing that I can do from my end will fix their DNS server issues. I finally got a sensible response back... how do you know that it's a DNS issue? Simple, I say, your DNS servers are not responding on the network (no PING or DNS check response), which tends to make Internet connections routed through Virgin Media not work very well. I know that it was just a DNS issue because changing the local DNS on my PC to an alternative DNS server, 8.8.8.8, fixed everything therefore it's a Virgin Media issue with their DNS servers. The tech support made a few quick checks and confirmed that they indeed were not working, apologised for the time taken to report it and promised to report it internally and get them working ASAP. We had a little laugh about how stupid the scripts are but that they had to follow them anyway, and that was that. I kept my DNS settings on 8.8.8.8 and had a lovely high speed Internet all to myself for the next hour or so... it was obvious when they had fixed it the speed took a noticeable drop due to the high contention ratio for domestic connections.