I've finally got a friend's Virgin landline working again. It failed on Thursday (suspiciously during the storm). Virgin persistently insisted to her that it was working and it must be an issue with the her equipment. This was despite the fact that none of her three phones, which had all been working prior to this, would work when plugged into the master (and only) socket. The connection was clearly non-existent - I opened their boxes and could find no duff connection anywhere - just that the entire thing was stone dead.
They continued to insist that the line had been 'tested' and was working.
Grudgingly, after two days of phone calls, they said they would "look at it" on the 10th of March. After a significant bit of aggro, they attended this afternoon and found the faulty connection in the street box a hundred yards away.