Virgin Cable - problems accessing UK sites

[Trapper]

Anyone else having problems connecting to UK sites - Telegraph, BBC etc.

 

Anything in the US is fine.

[SpuffMonkey]

All OK here

[AMLinington]

I've had intermittent issues accessing the Southern Electric site but a reboot of the router usually fixes it. Although I am having to reboot that router far more than I would like for other reasons too, so I'm not convinced it isn't the shoddy firmware TBH... My wireless seems to die at least once a week. Can't wait for the decorating to be finished so I can bung it into bridged mode and hook up my own hardware.

[jinnantonnixx]

Are you using Virgin's DNS servers or other ones? Do the addresses resolve correctly?

[AMLinington]

I suspect I'm using the Virgin DNS as I have not yet gotten around to changing it. Every time I log into the interface the wireless goes down so I tend not to fiddle with it too often. I will probably use openDNS when I'm configuring my own hardware but until then, we're having so many issues with it and calling support so often that it's not worth changing their defaults as they use it as an excuse to fob us off...

 

Although, since a reboot resolves the issue, I am more inclined to think it's an issue with the shoddy firmware more than anything else as it will randomly stop one or two devices from accessing anything. LeBoyfriend can be browsing fine on his laptop, but his phone won't be able to connect, my laptop will have no connection but my phone will be fine and the XBox is fine too. I'll then boot another machine and it will fail to find the network SSID.

 

Weird. Stupid. Virgin. Nuff said.

Edited May 14, 2012 by AMLinington

[ricki]

Mine goes off when it rains

 

Richard

[north-ict]

I dont have virgin but sometimes pages don't load for me and was surfing forums for similar issues that people had and came across a program called namebench which searches and recommends the fastest DNS servers for you. It suggested to me that if i switched to openDNS servers that it would be 55% faster than my current ISP DNS server!!!!

 

I showed my friend just yesterday the program (his on virgin broadband) and he ran it and it stated his was the fastest.

 

Maybe give that a try?

 

namebench - Open-source DNS Benchmark Utility - Google Project Hosting

[LeMarchand]

I can't imagine that this is what is happening with you, but I had a call from a friend who had a similar problem recently. On investigation it turned out that he was using one of those Blocklist programs to attempt to obscure his torrent trail and it was blocking a whole swathe of sites. I definitely remember that the BBC and some UK news sites were amongst those he couldn't access.