After a bit of googling I discovered the reason for this is that my ISP, Virgin Media, have deliberately disabled SNMP access. Reports vary on the reasons for this, some claim “performance” others “security”, but both are utterly bogus reasons. All this does is deny customers basic information about their connection like bandwidth usage, and I can only conclude that Virgin Media want to make it more difficult for people to dispute their figures.

This isn’t enough to make me ditch VM, but it has pissed me off, and the next time I move house VM are going to be waaay down the list of providers I’ll look at.

PS. My router doesn’t support SNMP either so I can’t use that.