Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 01 August 2008 10:50
Your IT -
Mobility
Page 3 of 4
Given that I’ve read concerns about the quality of the Virgin Broadband service that gives you broadband and a landline equivalent number being “flaky”, I asked a Virgin Mobile spokesperson if this meant iPhone users might experience flaky data connections, too.
The response I received what that Virgin Broadband and Virgin Mobile are separate, and even though I said “but it’s connecting to the same 3.5G mobile network, isn’t it?” was assured that it was different and iPhone users wouldn’t experience problems.
However, not all Virgin Mobile customers are convinced. In a comment to my
previous story on Virgin possibly getting the iPhone 3G, which is of course confirmed with this story, a reader called James
made the comment in our forum that:
“james on Tue Jul 29, 2008 3:48 pm
“Hi, don't be fooled by Virgin Mobile's value for money pricing!
“I was on this for 2-3 months, and I got fed up with their network problems. And I'm not the only one, see this whirlpool thread I have participated in:
“The internet connection was never reliable, always getting timeouts, and gateway errors. It worked, maybe 2 minutes at a time, but never actually worked long enough so you would be able to do something useful.
“Also after contacting Virgin Mobile representatives, I received the stock standard, "No, nothing wrong on our end, contact the support team to fix up your settings".
“It was working a month a go with the same settings, why am I the one that's caused these problems all of a sudden? And why is it happening to an increasing number of customers as well?
“Bad form Virgin Mobile. A 3G connection that works only sometimes, is pretty much a connection that doesn't work at all.” In another Whirlpool thread,
available here but also linked at the Whirlpool link above, Robert Tihanyi who is listed as a “Virgin Mobile ISP Representative” said on Tuesday the 29th of July that:
“We are currently tracking a 'connected but no data throughput' issue that is affecting some areas of Melbourne and Victoria. We also believe we have identified the cause, and are working hard on a resolution over the next week or so.”
Others in the same thread complained that the issues were being experienced in places other than "some" parts of Melbourne and Victoria, so providing we can believe that Robert Tihanyi really is from Virgin Mobile, it would seem that some problems are being experienced and are being worked on to resolve them.
Clearly, if the broadband issues are real, a lot of Virgin iPhone users will soon be placing extra pressure on the network. Once again if the issues are real as described at Whirlpool, it’s in Virgin’s best interests to fix them quickly otherwise there could be an onslaught on further complaint, none of which will make consumers or Virgin Mobile terribly happy, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for user experiences.
So, what does Virgin Mobile’s CEO have to say about the whopping new 5GB data plans? Please read on to page 4.
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