Just leaving this reply to add to the stack of unhappy customers, and to make it clear that this change is the reason I am in the process of switching my provider. When I chose to sign up with Virgin, I implicitly knew at the time that I would have access to port forwarding abilities. Though it's a shame that Virgin implemented CGNAT, I can understand it as a business decision or whatever.
What I can't understand is how they found it appropriate not to notify me of this fundamental change in the service I was paying for. I have dug through my emails and found no trace of Virgin reaching out to inform me of the change - but perhaps I missed it, buried in the hundreds of marketing communications I receive from them trying to upsell me on services I don't want or need.
Worse than that, they seemingly have no ability or desire to update the interfaces in their machines to reflect the withdrawal of these features. Meaning Virgin's modems continue to advertise a feature-set they no longer possess, thereby misleading their customers about a product they are currently paying for.
This might lead to someone like myself - having limited but demonstrable self-hosting experience on that very same router - coming home from work intending to spend the precious few hours of free time they have on a leisure activity which involves server hosting, only to spend 3 hours troubleshooting all to hit a brick wall at the ISP level. Three hours of my router's admin controls telling me my ports were forwarded. Three hours checking and rechecking settings I knew were correct - because they had worked on this very same router mere months ago. Three hours digging through threads of other confused people also in the unfortunate position of having to learn more about network troubleshooting than they ever wanted to. This month's Virgin bill cost me $100.00 + 3 hours of my personal time I can never get back, investigating a mystery whose explanation is "my service provider lied to me about the service they provide".
To be clear, I don't begrudge this particular community manager's reply here. In fact, it's the only communication I have found from Virgin relating these new restrictions to their customer base. It's clear and concise in its explanation of the features which have been disabled - though this forum's design does its contents a disservice by labelling it a "solution".
What it is is a notice of change in service. It's the kind of notice that I would expect to see in place of the button once labelled "port forwarding" in my modem's settings. It's the kind of notice I should have had plastered in my inbox in place of marketing emails. It's the kind of notice we all should have received weeks in advance ahead of the change - so that we, as consumers, could make informed decisions about the purchases we make.
So no, not a solution. A solution would look more along the lines of "we don't do that anymore, try somewhere else".
