I take it this is a network-wide outage as everyone I know on Sipgate cannot make or receive calls, my router is showing that I cannot log on, pinging times out to sipgate.co.uk and there's no secure logon over on their website.

Have been able to make and receive calls today, no problem

made calls Saturday/Sunday and today also accessed the site same days

Update on this - apparently it's only affecting parts of London and the Midlands, it's a Virgin problem.

Are you saying its only those using virgin as their ISP not Sipgates fault then?

Seems that way now, the Virgin DNS problems are starting to expand into other parts of the country, although Sipgate is the only site I've had major problems with, others around me have reported problems accessing some other sites.

Yes Virgin are having DNS issues, some havent been able to get on to Digital Spy, some Ebay and more...

I am with Virgin (Blueyonder) and Sipgate. Once the Sipgate service was great, indistinguishable from landline quality. Recently it has got worse and worse, now it is all but unuseable. I have been bending the ear of a very helpful Frederik at Sipgate, but despite his and his engineers best efforts no improvement. When I ping sipgate with the following command:
ping -l 200 - n 100 sipgate.co.uk

I get a dropout rate of about 6%, often more with average times of about 35ms. Other sites only drop about 1% or less and average response times are sub-20ms. Infact their average response is lower than the sipgate quickest response time.
There does seem to be a virgin-sipgate problem - does anybody know more? I would really love to sort this issue as I have been very happy with Sipgate.

Think you'll find its more virgin at fault..By the way I think Frederick is either the only guy at Sipgate or they all have the same name. I had similar problems at first and after chasing Plusnet the ping test came down1% on a bad day

hmmm, the trouble is, when I chase Virgin, they don't bother to reply. I email them via their website contact form, I get an automated acknowledgement email saying they will reply within 48 hours, and then nothing. Twice that has happened. Not very good.

What was the nature of the issue with Plusnet? Any pointers on what I need to be telling Virgin (assuming they are listening...)

Posting a message in blueyonder.support.access.hi-speed newsgroup usually gets a quick response, sometimes minutes. Though they finish work at 22:00.

Virgin have had some DNS issues of late.

Use text.news.virginmedia.com as the server name.

I take it from being in The Midlands you are xTelewest.

My problem was I bought Siemens dec for use without the PC the voice quality was very broken up almost unusable . I contacted Sip and they gave me the Ping tests to do , I sent them the results (High dropouts) and they said I needed to contact Plusnet as that was where the problem lay. I did that and a few days and emails evntually got some guy who said they would check there end.Lo and behold it then went good .Of course I got another email from plusnet telling me I neede to ensure certain ports were forwarded but I ignored that as it was all ok
Below are Plusnets replies



The pings are a little misleading for a number of reasons. Pings and VoIP use different protocols and packet headers and are therefor treated differently across our network. The performance of all VoIP traffic on the network should be highly prioritised at all times as per our network management information available on the portal.

If you are getting voice transmission problems you may wish to try using a less data intensive codec within your software or hardware.

If this does not resolve the issue if you can provide us with any specific ports or protocols used by sipgate we can double check that these are being correctly managed by our platform.


I would still strongly suggest playing with the codec a little bit. Having used voice applications for some time, I know a small, barely noticable, sacrifice on the transmission rate can have a huge effect on the over all stability and quality of your VoIP calls.

++ internal ++
please confirm whether ports 5004 and 1000 are prioritised as VoIP or provide details as to the reason for deprioritisation.
Thanks, thats exactly the infoI was looking for. Im passing this ticket through to our network engineers to confirm that ports 5004 and 1000 are being prioritised correctly as VoIP service ports or gain information as to why they are being deprioritised.
as VoIP or provide details as to the reason for deprioritisation.

I use G711a CODEC as I have no worries about bandwidth.