My BT Vision of hell

 

Gallery

Posted on 21 May 2007 at 17:41

A few months ago, desperately wanting a Sky+ box but refusing to pay hundreds of pounds for one, I ditched Sky - much to the horror of my family - and signed up for BT Vision.

As I was already a BT Broadband customer, it seemed like a great deal - a free set-top box with PVR functionality, and just £90 for setup and installation. Plus, I liked the idea of downloading movies when I fancied for around £3, so I got rid of our online DVD subscription too. Quids in, I thought.

A couple of months later, BT emailed me to say it was ready to test my line and check whether I could receive Freeview. With both of these boxes ticked, a helpful engineer came round to set up the box and configure the Home Hub wireless router on the promised date.

Once the box was in place and connected to the hub, it took three goes for the start-up to work. The engineer recommended a hard restart each time, which involved pulling out the mains cable and pushing it back in after a short wait. There are safer ways to reboot, as I discovered later.

The initial downside of the installation was that the hub had to be moved from the centre of the house, where it worked perfectly, to next to the Vision box, which has led to patchy wireless reception in some parts of the house and no reception at all in the garden. The BT engineer assured me there was no way to boost the signal or get a second box installed elsewhere, which puts an end to me enjoying the sun while working outside.

However, the Freeview reception is good; in fact, it's considerably better than the built-in receiver in my TV. The PVR works well too, and is only let down by the patchy programme information. I soon got the hang of recording programmes, and even the kids forgave me for losing all their Sky channels when they realised I could set the box to record whole series of their latest favourite shows.

Frozen out

However, after a couple of weeks, things started to go badly wrong. The first sign was that I could no longer put the box into standby. Then I tried to download a film from the on-demand section: this played for 20 minutes and froze, with an error message saying to call technical support.

I tried restarting the box and hub, but to no avail, so resorted to the helpline. I initially got through to the broadband helpdesk, who had no idea what I was talking about and eventually found someone who at least knew what BT Vison was. Although very pleasant, they just told me to try a reboot. Of course, this still didn't work, so I called back and asked not to be charged for the film, only to be told that someone would call back in a couple of days. Not surprisingly, they didn't and a few weeks later a bill dropped through the letterbox...

Meanwhile, the box started to show further signs of strain. It became almost impossible to use the system without the box freezing completely or losing functions, which could only be resolved with a reboot. This took between three and 15 minutes to complete, and wasn't always successful first time. I can't remember a day in the last two months when the box didn't have to be rebooted at least twice in the space of an evening's viewing. The problem got so bad, in fact, that I bought another Freeview box for the spare TV, so at least the kids could watch what they wanted when they wanted without a huge wait.

The call centre staff said this was a well-known problem and it will be resolved with a software upgrade. The timescale for this upgrade has ranged from 'imminent' to 'some time in the future' to 'when Microsoft amends the software'. Apparently, the PVR is partly responsible for the regular box freezes, as unlike most Freeview boxes, which get their programme information over-the-air, the V-Box gets its information via your broadband connection from a website.