Dreading the move to ADSL

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

In a few months I’m buying a flat. It’s not quite finished yet, but I’ve been inside it and I’ve seen the specs, all of which look impressive, except for one tiny problem. The block will have a communal Sky dish and connection points in every property, but I was told this week that cable won’t be an option.

This is bad. Very bad.

I’ve been with Virgin broadband in various properties for nearly four years now, and I’m genuinely despondent at the thought of switching to ADSL. Some of you will probably bring up traffic shaping, customer service and other less appealing aspects of Virgin’s offering, but I’m not listening. The blinkers have gone up and my opinion is set in stone: cable broadband just works, and I can’t live with anything less.

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First look: the Virgin Media Freedom netbook

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

While mobile broadband dongles are undoubtedly well-matched with netbooks, most mobile broadband firms offer third-party netbooks with their respective dongle deals: T-Mobile bundles its dongle with an Eee PC 904HD, Vodafone entices customers with a Samsung NC10 and Orange lets prospective buyers choose between HP, Asus, Samsung and Toshiba models.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is the first mobile broadband company to release its own netbook and, while it’s undoubtedly very similar to Zoostorm’s offering – even sharing the same name, the ambitious “Freedom”, – it’s an interesting move and a good-looking product.

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Is HD TV finally worth paying for?

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I remember when we first started talking about HD. Back then it was this mythical beast that would tear apart video as we know it with its millions of pixels, and leave us all cursing standard definition for being as fuzzy and vague as Colin Jackson’s “expert” Olympic analysis.

Then it arrived and we loved it. The first time I ran a 1080p video on my 40in TV, my non-techie housemate grabbed the controller and kept replaying the same HD movie trailer for what seemed like an hour, so enamoured was he with the detail. Those of us with a PlayStation3 or Blu-ray player can enjoy the delights of HD by renting movies, but TV has been much slower out of the blocks.

Put simply, even a drum-beating HD lover like myself can admit the line-up of HD channels just hasn’t been worth paying for. Cable customers with Virgin’s V+ box can watch several free channels like BBC HD (and enjoy the excellent Olympic coverage, Jackson aside), but Sky HD is the big gun we all pinned our hopes on. And it’s expensive. Very expensive. (more…)

Keep your bloody phone lines, I’m off to cable

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

I moved house a couple of weeks ago. Very spacious actually, although the garden could do with a trim, thanks for asking. Being an IT nerd, the first thing I did when I’d finished unloading boxes was to get the phone line and Internet set up – how hard can it be, right?

The answer, according to those lovely folks over at BT and TalkTalk, appears to be “as difficult as we can possibly make it without sticking two fingers up and suggesting yoghurt pots and a piece of string”.

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