It seems very reliable other than on Virgin, I've not noticed any downtime. I imagine phoning Virgin tech support for their take on this would be as useful as a chocolate teapot.
have you ever spoke to virgin? reboot your modem -no dont work - ok we send engineer.
That's exactly what it's like most of the time, although once, a year or two ago now, I managed to get patched through to a woman that knew her stuff, remotely logged in to my box and sorted out the issue, think it was to do with TV on demand at the time. I expect there are the rare people there who actually know stuff!
I expect getting through to someone who actually knows about the routing for webpages is non existant though