Cable Forum - My modem upgrade experience

A personal off-shoot from the 'XL Modem Upgrade' thread .

Trying to worm out of the issue of having an Ambit NTL 100 modem, popular opinion of which is it won't handle the 20Mb package. But, as we have discovered on the Virgin Mediamodem replacement request page, the Ambits all check out and apaprently are all good for it. However, all of the people in the know from this board, and even the people manning the tech service lines all agree; those modems have got to be swapped. So here's what I did.

I tried to give customer services a chance at getting the modem replaced seeing as they agreed the site was wrong, sadly no-one seemed able to organise this, even for a 'quick start' replacement. Tech services said they couldn't sort it out and forwarded me to billing. Billing department said the same thing, and redirected me to sales. Sales department said they couldn't do it either and suggested I speak to Tech support. It was here I stood a little firm and pointed out the circle I was about to be redirected around in. After a bit of banter and head scratching, sales department conceeded that I should go to the Modem upgrade page again and lie about which modem I had so that I could access the on-line request form and apply for modem change.

So, I wouldn't entirely call it a method which is officially sanctioned by VM customer support, but it was suggested as a last ditch method really in the face of a dead end by the helpline staff. And away I went, ticking the box in the Motorola 3100 box and gaining access to the application form. Hopefully this will yield a new modem in the post over the next week or so, although, I do feel a bit shady in the way it had to be done. Still, it was the only option really.

Have been thinking as to why those modems are labelled as acceptable on that page when so many people (including VM tech employees) know different. The only conclusion I came to is that it was a method to offset the cost of getting so many modems replaced at one given time by only having say half of the red flagged modems actually register as in need of replacement to begin with, so they get less requests for new ones - and then later, they change the page to reveal the truth about more of the models and then get those swapped at a slightly later date.

Or, I suppose it is equally as likely as they don't want to swap the ambits at all and save a bit of cash. After all, there must be a fair few out there in the network still chugging away.