As a little add on to my last message:
Once the phones came back up, I was able to speak to friends also on Virgin and they also had been OFF for the duration I was. One was told that the fault was known to Virgin and she was given a fix time. I was told I'd probably need an engineer to sort it.
As to other friends, they just saw the reports or listened to the radio to hear of national issues that are going on, and assumed it was just that - a national issue. Certainly outage maps showed thousands of people reporting issues yesterday and the week before.
I would like to say that this 'switch over' is something I"m not aware of - would someone kindly expalin it to me?
I'm still on an old fashioned landline i.e. it doesn't come through my hub. I rather like this arrangement as it means I could call 999 in the event of an emergency if there was another outage or power failure. Gathering information from other customers, it looks like this new hub phone idea is going to be rolled out, like it or not.
