Posts tagged Internet
Faster than the speed of light
9Three weeks ago I had 10MB Virgin Media broadband installed and have been enjoying a super fast connection. Since the service has been so good I’d been considering upgrading to their 30MB package but had to take into consideration the cost of their Super Hub which is required for 30MB and beyond speeds, costing £75.
Last Wednesday I received a call from Virgin Media with a broadband deal for me: 30MB broadband, free for the first 3 months and free Super Hub. I simply couldn’t resist this offer and the hub was delivered to me on Friday.
I just had to swap my hub over, call their activation line and then wait 15 minutes before trying to connect to the internet. This was probably the most pain-free installation process ever.
I checked my speeds via Speedtest.net and it was coming in at 29.35Mb/s down, 3.07Mb/s up. I was very impressed. A quick check of my speed today and it’s showing as…
I’m really thrilled with 30MB broadband and am looking forward to downloading some movies from iTunes to put it through it’s paces.
Like a virgin, for the very second time!
3Last year you may remember I tried and tested Virgin Media Broadband after experiencing problems with my o2 Home Phone and Broadband. Sadly I ran into frustrating issues getting websites to fully load on Virgin, if it all, and cancelled within the 30 day cooling off period. I had little choice but to stick with o2 who I was still having many problems with, but several perplexed engineers later it seemed to magically resolve itself.
One week ago my o2 broadband was once again disconnecting at an alarming rate. After calling them and getting the usual “plug into the test socket and we’ll check for faults” I couldn’t help thinking last year was going to repeat itself all over again. One engineer after another scratching their head trying to work out why my service was flakier than a flaky thing, all coming to the conclusion that everything was fine and that I should take it up with o2 again.
Because I didn’t relish the thought of having no reliable service for the foreseeable future, I took the opportunity to call Virgin Media to enquire about their broadband once again in the hope that any problems that did exist in my area were fully fixed 12 months on. Friends and family have been switching to Virgin within this time and have had a superb service with them. Because I have their Large TV package with Sports collection, I can get 10MB fibre optic broadband for around £15 per month. I was able to choose self-install as I have all the cables at the back of my TV which the hub simply needs to be plugged into. This saved me £40 on an engineer.
I then received a phone call on Wednesday from an “o2 Guru” who said a fault had been discovered at my local exchange which would be fixed within 24 hours. It was 4 hours later after I arrived home after taking that call and noticed my connection had been down but was also running faster, at around 3.5meg. This, for me, is fast. So, just two days before I was due to have my 10mb fibre optic activated I found myself with a fully working o2 connection – typical. However my delight was short-lived as come Friday not only was my broadband down but also my home phone! I didn’t care too much as I’d just taken delivery of my Virgin Media Hub and my connection was up and running.
My experience second time around with Virgin Media has been wonderful. I visited all the websites I had problems with last year and there they all were, downloading in a snap. I ran a speed check and was getting 9.85meg. Fantastic. My contract with o2 Home Phone and Broadband ended in May, so I’m now fully free to move all my services to Virgin Media and will be doing so when I choose the right telephone package for me. I’ll also be upgrading to their 30MB broadband because of the bundle discount. I would be signing up as soon as possible, but the telephone installation will cost £40 plus another £30 for the Super Hub to support 30MB broadband. That can wait until my next big bill or two is safely out of the way.
Like a Virgin….
40On Saturday 11th September, a Virgin Media engineer came to my house to install 10MB fibre optic broadband and TV. The installation took approximately 20 minutes, not the estimated 2 hours. I was given a booklet on how to set up the Virgin Wireless Hub and I was online extremely quickly once I’d gone through the setup.
The first thing I did was head over to speedtest.net to check the speed. My speed registered as 9.75meg. I was perfectly happy with this. However, one of the first things I noticed was many websites taking a long time to load. Sites that weren’t particularly graphically heavy. Fruit Bytes also wasn’t loading as quickly as usual. A few times I’d get a message in Safari similar to those when my internet has disconnected.
After mentioning the issues I was experiencing on Twitter, some suggested it may just need time to settle or perhaps it was DNS related given that some sites loaded but others didn’t. Over 24 hours later things still weren’t improving and I had to reconnect my o2 Wireless router to hop back onto o2 for simple web browsing as Virgin was taking a frustratingly long time.
On Monday I called Virgin tech support to explain the symptoms and the chap I spoke to seemed to immediately understand what the problem was. He was broad Scottish so I found some of what he said difficult to understand but too much power and signal was mentioned. He said he would get a technician out to me and seemed fairly positive that he would be able to sort the problem out.
The technician arrived yesterday afternoon. I took him into the office to show him some of the sites that were lagging. He tried to log into the root of the hub but couldn’t remember the password. He gave up on that and took a look at my TV signal via my VirginHD box. He didn’t explain much (or anything) to me, other than muttering “that’s too low” as he went outside to the box. When he came back he said he’d changed levels and that should sort out my internet, but we came back upstairs to test it. Once again sites were lagging. He said he would “get onto the network” and said that I might see engineers going up and down the street as they work on it. But I was still slightly confused – would they contact me to tell me it’s fixed? Did I need to do anything? I just didn’t know.
So, a couple of hours later I telephoned tech support again and spoke to a pleasant chap who ran a test on the router and seemed to understand what the problem was. He put me on hold while he investigated and came back to say that there was indeed a fault in my area that would be fixed in 24 hours. He gave me the specific house number of a neighbour a few doors away from me who had also reported the issue. I felt satisfied that it was going to be repaired and I could enjoy speedy internet.
This morning I checked the service status page for my area and all services were marked red and showing as disrupted: Broadband, TV and Telephone. The work started just after 10.30am and was estimated to end at 2.30pm. At around 3pm I checked the service status again and it was all green and showing as ‘good’. I tried connecting and then viewing webpages. The lag was still there, often worse. Another phonecall to tech with the Indian call centre telling me a signal had been sent to my router and I was instructed to switch the hub off for 2 minutes while also shutting down my computer for 5 minutes. I carried this out and then after re-connecting nothing changed. I asked to be put through to customer care to find out which date my cooling off period ends as I wasn’t satisfied with the broadband service. I have until 9th October to change my mind.
At the moment it’s looking increasingly unlikely that I will be staying with Virgin Media for my broadband unless they can get an engineer to thoroughly test things at my property. I have been connected to o2 broadband at just over 1.5meg and webpages have downloaded in the blink of an eye. Compare this to consistent 9.5meg Virgin connectivity and webpages will barely load at all. It doesn’t make sense. I can download a track in iTunes very quickly with Virgin, but for browsing the internet you can absolutely forget it.
I would be willing to allow an engineer to call out to me one more time to see if this can be resolved. I would hope that the next engineer would have the sufficient login details for the hub so that this can be investigated fully rather than just checking my TV signal which wasn’t the issue. Right now I’m very disappointed in Virgin Media and can’t quite believe I’ve been hit by such problems from day one.
If anyone can offer any advice on this, perhaps if you’ve suffered similarly with Virgin and more importantly how it was resolved I’d very much appreciate it.
From o2 to Virgin
181 year ago
For three years I’ve written about my experience with o2 Broadband. All sickeningly positive, praising the reliability of service, speed and customer support. Because of this experience I switched my home telephone provider from BT to o2 when their home phone service began in the Spring. It was this move that heralded the beginning of the end of my love for o2. It’s a long story, one I shall attempt to condense into a few short paragraphs.
Since switching to o2 Home Phone and Broadband my connection has been terrible. Really terrible. It began almost immediately from my switch-on date of May 20th. It came in the form of many disconnections initially, to much slower speeds, dropping from 3.5mbps with reliability to 1.5mbps with disconnections as often as every 30 minutes.
Many telephone conversations have taken place between myself and o2 Broadband in the last 3 months and sadly the relationship has continued to deteriorate. Within 6 weeks they send me 2 brand new routers (o2 Wireless Box II), sent me new filters, changed the noise margin on my line to see if that would provide stability and I have had no less than 3 BT telephone engineers to my home to check and repair faults. All these engineers left my property satisfied that the issue was resolved. Only it never was.
o2 Broadband told me that once they’ve run all the tests they can on my line, they will send out a Broadband Engineer, not a telephone engineer. Last week we reached the point where the tests were completed, but the last conversation I had with them was the final straw. I was told, by a lady at o2, that I would need to have 30 disconnections an HOUR before they would send an engineer to me. Yes, 30. It was clear that with my current rate of re-syncs that they just were absolutely unwilling to do anything more than fiddle with noise margins and repeatedly talk to me like an idiot, asking “are your filters plugged into your sockets?”.
So, despite still being in contract with o2 Home Phone and Broadband until May 2011, I have signed up to Virgin Media to receive their 10MB Fibre Optic cable broadband (and TV package). I will get 3 months for £15 per month for my broadband then £20 per month thereafter. This means I’ll still be paying for an o2 Broadband service that I won’t be using, from o2. It’s not ideal since I should be receiving a service that I’m paying for, but o2 have let me down really badly and have had little choice but to seek an alternative.
As many longterm readers know, I’ve been a huge advocate of o2 Broadband the entire time I’ve been writing here. I have converted many friends, online and offline, to o2. Now I am advising to avoid like the plague. When it really matters and you have a problem, their support just aren’t prepared to send the necessary engineer to resolve the issue. Their advert about nobbling broadband niggles is now laughable. And their telephone message when calling for technical support is equally so…
Did you know that many o2 broadband connection problems can be fixed by switching your broadband box on and off?
Ah if only, o2, if only.
So, after 3 years I am finally waving goodbye to DSL with o2 Broadband and when my contract expires in May I shall also be taking my home phone needs to Virgin Media. I hope that I have a better experience with Virgin Media and that support will acknowledge and deal with problems should they occur. From what I’ve been told by friends who are already with Virgin, it seems that they do technical support very well. My installation date is Saturday 11th September.
My o2 Broadband [rating:0.5/5] AVOID AVOID AVOID
A year with…o2 Broadband
193 years ago
In a couple of weeks time it’ll be 12 months since I switched to o2 Broadband. I was reminded of this today when I received a letter from my old provider, BT Broadband, begging me to go back to them and in return they’ll offer me some perks like the BT Home Hub and £7.95 for the first three months. What? And leave reliable o2 that I pay £7.50 to per month all the time? “No!” would be the short and polite answer to that.
During my 12 months with o2 Broadband I have been asked about the service and reliability from a lot of people who wanted to jump ship from their current ISP. Given that o2 is a broadband newcomer at barely 12 months old itself (I joined a week after it was introduced) people were naturally curious about whether it could deliver the goods given it’s low price (£7.50 per month to existing Pay Monthly and PAYG customers for the Standard 8MB unlimited package). So, after 12 months I thought I could give my thoughts and opinions.
I can’t fault o2 Broadband at all. It certainly hasn’t experienced any teething troubles. In 12 months the only time I can remember a significant downtime was earlier in the year when service was down for a few hours. I called customer support and after getting through extremely quickly I didn’t even have to explain what the issue was – they already knew and assured me they were working on it. This isn’t customer support I’m used to. My experiences with BT Broadband were abysmal and the support would have liked me to think the issue was with my own computer – yeeees, my computer was causing the broadband to be completely out at the exchange 
In the past year I have recommended o2 to a good few people – some joined, some didn’t. Those who didn’t decided to stay with their current ISP after they were promised better speeds, but are now mostly regretting their decision because their service has continued to decline. Of those that did join on my recommendation, the last time I spoke to some of them they’d just been turned on by o2 and were thrilled to be whizzing through the intertubes at a vast rate. To avoid repeating what I’ve already said, you can read my other posts on o2 Broadband here and here. Everything still stands.
So, to briefly sum things up…
Reliability of Service: I have had no connection issues. I get around 3Mbps which is double the speed I got with BT (which I was paying three times more for, incidentally). Unfortunately my line isn’t capable of much more than that and it does the job, until all the horrid old copper lines are finally replaced with fancy new ones by British Telecom!
Customer Support: Excellent, 10/10, outstanding…you get the idea. Call Centres based in the UK, swift answer, friendly, speedy resolution of any issues since they have full control of my o2 Wireless Box from their end. Brilliant support for Mac users. Faultless.
Router: I have the “old” o2 wireless box, a Thomson 780. I call it the ugly one since the new ones are smaller and white – much prettier. But, I haven’t had any problems with this and the Admin interface is very user-friendly and detailed.
If you’re thinking of switching to o2 Broadband and have any queries that I haven’t already covered then shoot me a question in the comments 
Cyberphone W Mac
113 years ago
About 18 months ago I was approached by an Executive Producer in the US (who has worked on some very funny sitcoms over the years) about doing some work on his new web project and just to have a chat about the web site I was running dedicated to one of the shows he produced. He asked me if I had Skype so we could chat (for free) over that. I only had a Mac Mini at the time so I had no microphone or a compatible handset. Instead he had to call my landline which meant a considerably shorter chat than we would have enjoyed since the $’s were clocking up!
Since then a few Skyping opportunities have passed my way, mostly to give/receive some minor tech help, so I thought it was about time to invest in a decent handset that I could plug into my USB port for when those moments arise. I have a built-in mic in my iMac, but being able to chat through a handset feels more personable, to me at least.
After a bit of a search I discovered the Cyberphone W Mac. Nice Apple-white stylish design and best of all the handset features work so you don’t even have to touch the Mac to make a call if you don’t wish to. I shopped around, seeing prices ranging from £30 to £40. Then I hopped on eBay and saw it for £15 with £5 postage from VOIP Voice.
Included in the box was a voucher for 30 free SkypeOut minutes. I tried to activate it but the site said it was invalid – a quick look at the back of the card revealed the voucher expired June 2008. I figured that was one of the reasons for the low price and wasn’t too bothered as I’m mostly going to be Skyping across computers anyway. SkypeOut credit, should I need it at any point, is very reasonably priced anyway.
The installation is really simple, as you expect from products designed for Macs. Pop in the disc and drag the VOIPVoice app to the Application folder, that’s it. Then just simply plug your Cyberphone W Mac into the USB port as and when you want it. I have mine plugged in all the time and placed on my desk. When you open the VOIPVoice application, a telephone icon appears in the menubar. If you have the handset plugged in with the Skype app open, the icon will be green. If you have it plugged in without Skype open the icon will change to orange. There is a preference pane within the app so you can tell it to start VOIPVoice when you log in and Start Skype when VOIPVoice is opened. It has a voice menu so you can tell it to speak Caller Name and Online Status and you can also store up to 9 numbers for Speed Dial.
I created an extra Skype account on my PowerBook so I could make some calls to that from the Cyberphone. I tried that with the help of my Mum who was sitting infront of my PowerBook awaiting my call and she informed that the sound quality was excellent. So, we did a swap and I got my Mum to call my account on the PowerBook so I could listen to the quality while she was speaking through the handset. Very clear quality, most impressed. It was like she was in the next room. Oh, wait, she was!
There is a blue neon button on the handset which flashes when a call is incoming and illuminates when you are on a call. I shot a quick 10 second video of this so you can see and hear it in action.
[fruit]rYqDugBrPv4[/fruit]
It will also flash when there is new Voicemail so you can simply press that and listen to your messages. The handset has a lengthy 2.1m USB cable and is compatible with USB 1.1 or 2.0, requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher and you’ll need 150MB free hard disk space.
I haven’t used it extensively yet, but if you have any questions then fire away as I have a nice bumper pdf file User Guide which I’m sure will answer any queries you may have.
Recent Comments