“What you see is a mirage, as tuck-up picture that doesn’t describe what’s happening to your packets”

I’m intolerant of the usual approach to router and connection faultfinding. No, really. Even someone with my sweet and reasonable outlook can become sarcastic and spiteful after long enough on hold. But don’t settle back for a merry tale of quips to call centre operatives because the world has changed. What used to be a game of phone tag and discountnegotiation now has some real teeth: you need to work from home, leave enough bandwidth for streamed movies, pick the cheapest deal and get tech support out of departments almost totally denuded of staff. That’s a proper and worthy challenge.

So I’m asking you, please, to be careful before you follow advice on the internet connection support forums. As a case in point, let’s start with one from Virgin Media (read along at ). This isn’t to paint Virgin Media as a poor example – I don’t think it’s any better or worse than other big-name ISPs – but to take general note of the depressing and unhelpful difficulties people get into as they assemble their