Misery for Virgin Media mobe customers over mysterious 'EE data centre gaffe'

An unknown number of Virgin Media customers, who have been complaining about a shocking mobile service for at least the past fortnight, are being asked to wait for EE to resolve a technical blunder at its data centre.

Gripes about new SIM cards that were recently issued by Liberty Global-owned Virgin Media have spiked in recent weeks, with subscribers reporting slow speeds, no data connection or a completely dead service since their kit was swapped out.

The problems first appeared earlier this month. A customer named Steph posted a complaint on VM's forum on 6 September, after seeing other subscribers reporting similar issues. She said:

I just got my new phone on Thursday, same problem, not able to use mobile internet at all. Called them today and they also said to me that lots of SIMs issued in the last few days have the same problem, it's a problem at their end and if enough people complain it should get sorted quickly. Until then just have to wait.

Meanwhile, as flagged up to us by Register reader Alan, some customers whose SIM cards haven't been replaced are reporting cripplingly slow speeds on their 3G data connections. And this issue seems to have been going on since at least the end of last month.

A frustrated punter with the user handle adrenalize complained on 23 August:

I also get extremely poor 3G data speeds near Nottingham city centre. Reasonable signal 3G or H or H+ showing (often flicks between them) calls and texts absolutely fine. Data is sometimes non-existent and very frustrating.

Although 3G technology is inherently very poor when you are even a small distance away from the mast this would appear to be a network issue as at times I can get OK throughput.

I do occasionally use an EE 4G data SIM at the same location and I get 20MB/s download, probably from the same mast albeit 4G base station.

Although I know a fair bit about GSM etc I don't know how Virgin route their traffic and if it is different from if I was on EE. Virgin/EE techies please do some proper traffic analysis on your data network!!!

Similarly, on Twitter, Virgin Media has been fielding tweets from a number of unhappy mobile subscribers.

@virginmedia I recently upgraded phones and changed contracts, and my new phone has no 3g when it should....

— Mark. (@MarkChesser) September 11, 2014

@virginmedia got phone and sim card together. arrived on Saturday. Have had no mobile data since then. only receive emails when I'm on wifi

— mikeacord (@mikese13) September 8, 2014

El Reg asked Virgin Media what had gone wrong with the telco's mobile service, and also questioned whether it was dealing with a dodgy batch of SIM cards.

A spokesman at Virgin Media said:

No, unfortunately there is a problem at one of EE’s data centres. We are working with our network partner to ensure this is resolved as quickly as possible.

EE had not returned our request for comment at time of writing. We had asked for a statement from the mobile operator on Friday evening. A spokesman at the company said EE needed more time to respond with an "official statement" due to it being the weekend.

The Reg will update this story if we do hear back from EE. ®