Slashdot Mirror
Tens of Thousands Flee From BT and Virgin
twoheadedboy writes "The two biggest ISPs in the UK are losing thousands of customers. Earlier this week Virgin reported it had lost 36,000 cable broadband customers. BT, meanwhile, has seen around 125,000 active consumer line customers flee this quarter. With that many customers leaving, where are they going?"
I think many of users was using PC+DSL by mistake, it was just a trend.
They dont need much from internet, and they realise that a phone are enough for them?
Earlier this week, Virgin posted a 3.9% growth figure (http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/broadcasting/news/a331943/virgin-media-reports-39-percent-half-year-revenue-growth.html). They may be loosing customers, but the ones they have are spending more money. All year, Virgin has been doing well for itself.
Yet the very day before they announced this lovely growth, they made 50 staff redundant at one of their call centres in Liverpool. Similar cuts are being made across all of their ONSHORE sites. Virgin is well known for outsourcing their call centres and part of this reputation is how poor that support is - and it'll only get worse. Evidently, someone decided to save money somewhere so more of this growth could be funnelled into profits while the going is good, but it wont last wrong when people realise that the extra money they're paying doesn't get them a premium service.
* Disclaimer: I am a former Virgin call centre employee, however I got out of there into a much better job shortly before the recent redundancies.
Actually, the only happened twice. All of the recent issues have been caused by Blizzard's host in france, a couple of ISPs in Europe have been affected by it.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Virgin is basically the only cable ISP in the UK. Whereas leaving BT just involves changing your DSL provider, which is a matter of a few phone calls, leaving Virgin involves setting up DSL at all, possibly including the installation of a new phone line - it's quite a bit more complicated and expensive.
The important thing to remember here is that Virgin are (a) relatively cheap (b) very fast (c) unbelievably shit. They're actually more incompetent now, both technically and in customer service, than they were as NTL. They are so shit that people give up cable to go back to DSL, even with the expensive faff involved.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Cant say much about virgin but BT are far too expensive. Their unlimited broadband is £20-30 a month. What's worse is the fact that they wont even sell that expensive broadband unless you also get phone service which costs an extra £10 a month regardless of if you use it.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Because 80% of their call centre staff are outsourced to India. The training they receive is abysmal, they're rude and regularly just hang up on people. If you are with virgin and don't have an issue, you're fine, but if you have ever had an issue, it's a nightmare to get it sorted.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Yes. There are a lot of terrible cheap ISPs.
I use Zen, and the other good geek-friendly ISP is A&A. These companies do not fuck with your connection. They just don't. They're competent, they're nice, they have customer service. However, they're not cheap - £20-30/month. When cheap, shitty ISPs are offering deals at £8/mo, people go for the cheap deal, and promptly get what they're paying for.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
From anecdotal evidence of friends who use Virgin, it's because they're completely arse-disabled incompetent.
When Virgin bought a share of NTL and rebranded the company as Virgin Media, I know that a lot of the remaining technically-competent people on the TV side finally left the company - that it actually became worse for the workers. I therefor strongly suspect many of the remaining technically-competent people on the ISP side did too.
NTL was previously hypothesised as being an experiment in making BT's customer service look good. Virgin have continued the tradition.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
At the beginning of the century, Virgin were a good ISP. Price, speed and a ONE month contract.
BT is the choice of joe six-pack, and seriously piss me off. When some anti-consumer bullshit is going down, BT are always first in the headlines. (Virgin and talk talk shortly after)
And they had an advert which spun the benefits of 802.11n as a benefit of choosing their service.
"Wireless keep dropping out? Oh, you need the latest BT home hub".
Which basically translates to, the marketing department couldn't come up with one single other benefit of using their shite service.
BT are crap
British English always amuses me with this, treating collectives as plural.
Just FYI, Sky Broadband uses the same infrastructure as BT Broadband (both use BT OpenReach cabling). If you find BT laggy at peak times, you'll find Sky just the same.
Also, I know exactly two people who have been Sky Broadband customers- both were happy Sky TV customers, but were furious Sky Broadband customers- terrible customer service, endless technical problems, appalling support, and one of them was ripped off somewhat with the pricing (charged for a high-sped package that their local network couldn't support- paid it for 6 months until they finally managed to squeeze a refund out of them).
My advice is that if you must use the OpenReach network, go with one of the smaller players; at least they tend to offer better tech support when things go inevitably wrong.
Britain is (going to be) in a pretty bad recession (soon), which is going to hit the lower/middle classes pretty hard.. That seems to me to be a pretty good (if, of course, always only a partial) explanation for this phenomenon.
BT claimed for every customer that deserted Virgin in the last quarter, 20 joined BT.
Wow! It sounds like BT's doing really well! Until you actually think about it...
BT gets 20 new customers in the same time period that Virgin loses 1. But in that same time period, BT might also lose 2, and 30 might join Virgin....
The only way this statistic would be useful would be if it transpired that Virgin Broadband contracts required each customer leaving the service to be chopped into 20 pieces and sent to BT before their Migration Authorization Code could be generated.
I mean I'm in Germany and how have a quite decent small local ISP. The only thing that sucks is their e-mail server. (Its DNS resolver is heavily broken and it still doesn't support IPv6!)
You have two choices for an ISP in the UK:
Slow & shit or fast & shit, they don't have fast & shit in my area so I'm stuck on slow & shit aging telephone lines.
BT is a bit overpriced, but I found their service ok. I'll never go back to them after I unwittingly signed up to a self-renewing contract (I didn't even know such a thing was possible), and when it came to ending my 12 month contract with them, they told me that I hadn't given them 1 month notice prior to the end of the 12 months, and therefore they had contracted me into another 12 months. If I wanted to leave I would have to pay the entirety of the line rental for that year (nearly £200).
I'm currently on Virgin fibreoptic, and while the figures look great when you go to a broadband test website, for some reason the real-world usage is nothing like this. Streaming (especially youtube and bbc iplayer) is pretty bad, and seems to hang on a regular basis. It is much worse at peak times. And I know it can be done better having previously used superjanet 6 on university campus several years ago.
I'll probably look to moving to talktalk next - they seem well-priced and are apparently pretty quick too.
Both talktalk and Sky have been doing some aggressive marketing lately. I wonder if that's where people are going.
I don't have any personal experience but I've heard that they're not much better. In particular, I've not heard a good word about talktalk.
Those customers are buying smart phones and tablets.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I'm outside the area available for Virgin Cable, and my local BT exchange can still only support speeds of up to 4mbps to my home. With a large majority of smaller cities and towns in a similar position, I wouldn't be surprised is people are moving to mobile broadband packages, which can provide similar/better speeds in area with good coverage. For those that do normal web browsing, the typical mobile data tarrif you probably have on your existing mobile phone is more than enough to cover browsing. My mobile also acts as a wireless hotspot so setup is easy.
It is a very frustrating state of affairs in the UK, with such poor coverage and the variance in speed between areas is astonishing
Quite a few people have commented saying that it's no surprise that people are leaving BT - they're more expensive, utterly useless and switching DSL providers isn't as much hassle, whereas Virgin is a different case since their technology is actually better - why would people want to leave? The reasons are numerous, let me just give a few examples:
*Call centre staff are outsourced.
80% (if not more) of the call centre staff are outsourced to Indian call centres. This immediately creates a language barrier, particularly with anyone from Scotland as the outsourced staff can't understand the accent.
*ALL Call centre staff are severely undertrained
The offshore agents are barely trained at all, as they're trained by people who have been trained by people who have been trained by someone from IBM (whom Virgin contracts to do all their support) who hasn't actually done the job. The net result is that it takes agents months to get even remotely familliar with the tools and equipment Virgin uses and that's assuming they last that long.
Onshore isn't a great deal better. They have a dedicated training team, however the training period is 4 weeks. That's for EVERYTHING the job entails, from fixing modems, to wireless, to email and Virgin security. Years ago before wireless and the value added services were a factor, the training period was 6 weeks.
Additionally, the training material is GROSSLY out of date. It dictates that 2 days are spent learning how to adjust the frequency of a modem that is no longer used by Virgin. If a customer still has one of these modems, it is meant to be replaced immediately because it's well over 3 years old (more like 6). However, the training material is controlled by Virgin, who refuse to let the training team touch it. This means trainers are forced to train out old, outdated material and try to squeeze in the "real" material when and where they can.
The hiring process is even worse. No consideration is given to how technically minded you are, or how much you know about computers. I've seen people show up for customer services roles and been told they're going to do Technical support - despite barely knowing how to use a computer themselves.
*The VM Hub and Superhub
BT have a "home hub", whereas Virgin have relied on dedicated modems and separate routers for years. This meant that customers had to have 2 separate devices to get wireless and the wireless routers weren't Virgin specific (unlike the modems), meaning that customers could say they were broke, get new ones and sell them on ebay. So Virgin decided to do an all-in-one soultion, much like BT's home hub. There were two models - the VM hub and the "superhub". The VM Hub is a DOCSIS 2 device, the super hub is DOCSIS 3. The problem? Both hubs have issues, serious issues. The wireless range on the regular hub is ABYSMAL, you can literally lose the signal from being in the same room. The Superhub is SLIGHTLY better, but still nothing on a dedicated router. But can you still plug in your own router? Nope, VM deliberately disabled the DHCP options within the HUB, meaning you have to rely on it (although a patch is coming that will enable "gateway" mode). Other issues include the firewall causing connections to drop randomly, the hub would occasionally and for no reason decide to stop leasing IPs from the network, forcing the customer offline and so on. The list goes on and on and it still isn't fixed - most customers that went from a dedicated modem to a SHUB or HUB have regretted it and wanted their old modems back, but Virgin won't let support staff issue modems any more, so you're screwed.
*Sheer incompetence
The hubs are just one example of how useless Virgin are at implementing ANYTHING - they recently changed their website to "make it better" and give customers more control of their accounts, but instead it locked many customers out of their accounts entirely. It caused emails to get orphaned from accounts, meaning support staff wouldn't even attempt to reset a password or fix it because they
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If you're a Sky TV customer though, their broadband is cheap or even free, depending on the package, so for those people it's probably hard to beat.
Personally I'm on Virgin broadband, and if anyone was offering more than 2Mbps DSL where I live, I'd switch, but right now I don't seem to have an option. My connection used to be good, but something about the way they've implemented their traffic management, or perhaps some other aspect of their network changes over the last year, means that my connection at times is practically useless.
Oh no... it's the future.
30 quid (inc vat) all in (line rental, unlimited GB broadband, free calls to landlines) is why.
After some people I know in the UK on Virgin Media seemed to have latency issues, I did some digging and it seems every few months their traffic shaping appliance incorrectly starts classifying WoW traffic as peer to peer and consequently lag in WoW is in the 1000s of milliseconds.
See this ongoing thread:
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Fibre-optic-broadband-cable/World-of-Warcraft-Latency-Issues/td-p/167089/page/39
Any time it breaks, they take days to acknowledge the issue, when they eventually do, it then takes days before the fix is implemented. Despite no other European ISPs having the same issue, they have also had the audacity to claim in the same statement that although the fix will need to be done on Virgin Media's side, that Blizzard is also to blame because they made changes on their end without notifying Virgin Media.
+1. Zen are excellent; their caps are too low, but the service is *outstanding*.
Here in the States, we call that "World Class Customer Service".
Our marketing people really are top notch (or is it top gear on that side of the pond?).
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Having worked in a Jobcentre Plus, I can tell you that one of the first things people give up when they lose their job seems to be internet/tv and as Virgin package the two (three if you include phone) it's a big bill and unemployed people cannot afford it. Secondly, as more people buy mobile devices and internet enabled phones, they are not seeing the point to home broadband as many people (particularly women, and we have a lot of single mums in the UK) only use the internet for email and facebook.
As someone who was a Virgin customer for three weeks before their unbelievable poor service got so bad that we left again under the cooling off period I can say you're right on all of your points but you actually missed a few too:
The burst speed of the 30Mb line is indeed 30Mb but the effective speed is much lower. The connection suffers from incredible latency, such that the time to load an image heavy page was twice what on I now get on a 7Mb line.
Not only are the support staff incompetent, they're also outright dishonest. We were sold a package deal and then billed a higher price. Customer services then tried to say the deal we signed up for didn't exist despite it still being listed on the website.
After we left we complained and even the complaints process is just as bad. They fail to respond to letters, offer compensation but don't pay it and are generally a disgrace.
All in all it's a real shame since their V+HD TV box is genuinely better the Sky+HD (when it works), but I'd rather go back to dial-up than deal with them again for any service.
I have the Virgin 50/5 cable service and am very happy with it.
OK, I pay well over the standard rate (£44.99 a month - ~$70 USD) but I get a genuine 48Mbit/s down and 4.5Mbit/s up. I've found their technical support to be excellent and when I used to play WoW I'd have a consistent 30-40ms latency. I run my home office via a Cisco IPSec VPN tunnel and use HD video and voice all the time with almost no issues.
When I contrast this to my BT DSL service in my old place, I was lucky to sync in at 1Mbit/s down and 500Kbit/s up. Whole weekends of sparse connectivity weren't a surprise and I got used to having to go in to the office to work on my regular "no internet" days. All over a "super fast ADSL2+ line". My experience isn't unique, anyone living in an area with ancient cables far from the exchange is stuck in this situation.
So for me at least, Virgin can take my money. It works great, I have had almost no issues and when they say 50Mbit/s I'm pretty much getting it. I'm looking at moving house next year and a genuine criteria is decent internet. Virgin cable will be a good sign for me.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
The reasons are a lot to do with combined internet/telephony packages, which are wrapped up with significant monthly savings, an inability to be flexible in what must be one of the most fast-changing industries in all history, and an inability to meet the specific needs of individuals.
I have been with BT since before it was privatised, but now I doubt I shall stay with them. The reason is because they cannot (will not?) offer a static IP as a part of their package. With IPv6 available, and with many years having past for them to enable it, there really isn't any excuse left for this, especially as I am happy to pay for such a service. My current DSL provider (TalkTalk, but under an old, permanent Nildram contract which they are desperate to get me off of - and I'm moving house, so they will get their wish granted) can reduce my telephony bill by about £50 pcm, and they've been more than happy to provide me with a static IP (v4!)
There's been a LOT of mergers in the UK - it's getting harder to find a good DSL provider that meets my needs. But combined accounts and flexible facilities are why the big companies are losing out.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
With that many customers leaving, where are they going?
Outside?
What?
The systems are generally OK - I'm in the middle of nowhere and get a reasonable 2Mb/s most of the time, the home hub does the job and is fairly easy to use, but where they really fall down is whan anything goes wrong. We were recently down to 20Kb/s max for about three days and got nothing from telephone support other than "your line is rated at 2.8Mb/s" and the usual "can you reset your router" (and, memorably, "have you tried unplugging the ethernet cable?" on a machine with no wireless card).
Yup, the telephone support absolutely sucks. Their Twitter support, on the other hand, is really rather good - good communication, the guy (Keiran I think) actually seemed to know what he was talking about, and they got the problem fixed. He even got the xkcd shibboleet reference, and that is what it felt like talking to them after the phone support debacle. I seriously hope BT read this and put whoever deals with their Twitter support in charge of everything. (@BTCare should you need them).
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
The Superhub is SLIGHTLY better, but still nothing on a dedicated router. But can you still plug in your own router? Nope, VM deliberately disabled the DHCP options within the HUB, meaning you have to rely on it (although a patch is coming that will enable "gateway" mode).
I have a SuperHub with VirginMedia and I use my own router: you need to set "DMZ Host" in the "SuperHub" advanced settings to the IP of your own router's WAN port. That means that your router's external IP looks like a private IP (in a different subnet from the LAN obviously) but that's not a problem in practice.
I still have a BT phone line, but my ISP is with BE There, a LLU provider who have their own equipment in my exchange.
It's cheaper and much faster. With BT I was limited to 8/1 mb/s, whereas on BE I get 24/2 mb/s. In practice I sync at 16/2. So it's twice as fast for half the cost. The support is much better, I can use the "Live Chat" feature to make changes to my broadband profile, ask technical and billing questions, without being stuck on the phone. I find writing technical questions much easier than trying to explain it over the phone.
Using smaller LLU companies really offers a lot more value to the consumer.
Friends of mine who aren't really bothered about fast internet speeds are taking our Sky Broadband as part of their satellite TV package, costing an extra £5 or £6 per month. You can't compete against that for the money, single billing provider etc.
People are not leaving BT completely but rather switching call providers. BT are a monopoly in the UK, they are the only national provider of landlines. Due to regulation they are forced to allow third party telecoms providers to lease the lines at a wholesale rate. As a result there are hundreds of so called providers that do nothing more than lease the lines at wholesale prices and then sell them on to the consumer at a lower rate than the BT retail price. BT have been continually increasing their retail prices for both line rental and call charges so consumers are naturally switching their call traffic to the cheaper resellers. As others have said Virgin are useless and their prices are not competitive so people are switching to DSL either to get a better deal or better service. Note, BT retail are in fact gaining broadband customers despite loosing landline customers as they offer the most competitive Fibre To The Cabinet DSL service and many of the other DSL providers are either not offering FTTC or are far more expensive than the BT Infiniti option.
Zen don't sell something they can't deliver. But when they sell you 100GB, then by damn you get every byte of it, no filtering or traffic-shaping bollocks or whatever.
We regularly use a large chunk of our allowance in prime-time hours - my daughter basically gets her CBeebies and iPlayer via computer as we don't own a dedicated television - and have never had a hiccup. The only trouble I have ever had with the service has been when BT are shit (they wholesale the DSL).
Zen and A&A also explicity and sincerely support and understand the importance of Internet freedom in general, which is another reason to give them money.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Depending on exactly how you define resellers.
What has become increasingly common here in the UK is local loop unbundling. With local loop unbundling BT openreach* owns the physical line but the provider can operate their own ADSL gear. Afaict lines can be unbundled for just ADSL or for ADSL and voice (not sure if they can be unbundled for voice only or for ADSL and voice to different providers). LLU allows providers to avoid the high costs of using BTs ADSL backend network but comes at a price in that. So there are only a handful of LLU providers of which SKY and O2/BE (O2 bought BE but they still operate services under the BE name as we as their own) seem to be regarded as the best.
There are also many BT wholesale based providers but due to the way BT prices access to their backend network these tend to be expensive, congested or both.
* Part of BT but kept somewhat seperate from BTs other operations by the regulator.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Indeed, I may have glanced over that point a bit too much - where there's a will, there's a way, but Virgin doesn't in any way endorse or support what you've done there. If average joe calls in and says "this new hub is shit, can I use my old router?" they get told no and IF the agent tells them yes, the agent will be reprimanded for it because the next time average joe calls in and gets someone who doesn't know how it, he'll get pissed off and say "Last time I was told I can do it, now you're saying I can't?".
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
You forgot that after using the service at full speed for more than 45 minutes (I was on the M package), you go over your download quota and are throttled to 25% speed for five hours. I've just moved and instead of Virgin 10Mbit cable I'm on Sky DSL. I get 9Mbit max down, but my average speed is much higher than 2.5Mbit. I'd get fibre if it were available, but my money will not go into VM's pockets again - this older, "inferior" DSL technology gives me a better experience because of the lack of VM's shitty traffic management policies.
Yep. I can burn through my 50Gb so very quickly, but it is *very* nice to watch the traffic graph and see no spikes or dips- just the full speed of the line, 24/7. Their CS reps are also excellent- I got passed to the same rep each time I called when I had a line fault because the phone system looks up your calling number, sees the open ticket and the rep name and passes you through to them. Compared to dealing with our Indian friends, that kinda blew me away.
I probably missed more than a few, but I figured the post was long enough as it was. Honestly, aside from the technology in use (and by that, I mean using a cable network, not the actual implementation of that network), Virgin has very few saving graces.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If it werenâ(TM)t for them you would be speaking German now. (Yes, I am aware of the Muhlenberg Vote)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Another solution is to pay a little more for the "premium" options. Unfortunately this is not what most home users want to hear - the Internet is not important enough to justify the extra if they can possibly get by without it.
I switched off Be (though I still strongly recommend them if they are available in your area and FTTC isn't or you don't need FTTC) who have their own backhaul instead of using BT's, as I wanted to move to FTTC for the extra upstream capability (I now sync at ~10Mbit upstream, and see about 8.5Mbit in usable throughput, where the best my line was capable of otherwise was ~1.5Mbit). You pay extra for the 10Mbit up (otherwise you are capped at 2Mbit) usually by way of effectively being on plan intended more for commercial users and techies (like me) than the average home user, and the extra you pay also nets you "premium" status in certain parts of BT's network which apparently implies some traffic priority and thus far (I only move a month ago) seems to have protected me from the congestion problems other people on BT based ISPs report on the same exchange at certain times of the week.
In order of preference, if you are looking for reasonable speed with reliable QoS, I would suggest:
1. FTTC with 10Mbit up (even if you don't need the speed upstream, it may help) with an ISP that does not shape traffic or filter it (someone like AAISP) *if* you can afford it and FTTC is available in your area
2. ADSL2+ via Be if they are available from your exchange and your line isn't so long that you can't get more than ~5Mbit
3. ADSL2+ via another LLU provider (though do some research, not all are as good value for money), similarly dependant on line length
4. FTTC without premium (it at least puts you on the 21C network not the old IPStream setup) with a good non shaping/filtering ISP (yes, I would suggest copper to the exchange with Be or similar instead of FTTC via BT at the moment if you care about consistent quality of service more than raw speed)
5. ADSL2+ with a good ISP that either performs little or no traffic shaping (besides the minimum traffic management required for QoS purposes) and no filtering or one that is up front and honest about the traffic management they perform (good look reading between the lines there though!)
6. FTTC without premium with BT or just about any other ISP
7. Anything else if none of the above are available (i.e. if you are on a rural exchange that hasn't seen any upgrades in ten years) or you really do want the cheapest possible (as not of the above will be cheaper than a bog standard ISP where you will experience congestion issues at peak times and have terrible tech support should you ever need it)
I'm not sure where Virgin and other alternative fibre providers fit in there, none of them are available in my area so I've not really researched the ins and outs (though I'll point out that Virgin are usually third in line (behind TalkTalk and BT) when people are complaining about bad service and other behaviour customers would be irritated by if they know about it like http://www.badphorm.co.uk/).
This is probably why BT are seeing a drop in customers: people upgrading to FTTC but using another ISP rather than them, or people moving to LLU providers to try cure congestion/shaping issues they are seeing. For Sky I think they are just seeing a lot of people not renewing after the initial minimum contract - people that signed up because it was very cheap if you already have Sky TV but are jumping ship as soon as the contract is up as they've had problems with the service in that time.
What you are saying could be true in *some* cases but is largely misleading.
Sky purchased Easynet a while ago, and with that they became an LLU provider.
If you are a Sky LLU customer, then any similarities between you and BT are coincidences.
Also, ISP contention is not always on the user-to-isp pipe, but can also be at the internet-to-isp end. This means that you will get varying levels of performance depending on which Openreach-based ISP you use.
When "8mbps" ADSL1 was the hot thing, Zen were I think the *only* ISP describing to customers in detail precisely what they would get - 7mbps theoretical maximum (1mbps of overhead), and likely 4-5mbps unless they were mere hundreds of metres from the exchange. It's stuff like that. They've set up a strong expectation that they won't mess customers around, and have consistently delivered on that in the 6 years I've been with them.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Here in Sweden we see a substantial move from wired (Cable and DSL) broadband to wireless (HSPA and LTE). There are great savings (logistically and money) to be made if you skip traditional (copper) telephony and go all cell phone. Many (most?) have smartphones with tethering and generous data plans, and the carriers are happy to sell you a companion dongle for your computer for just a little additional charge to the data plan.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Mobile broadband, the third millennium (fake) dream.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Once people who drop wired Internet in favor of 3G get hit with huge overages for watching video all evening, they'll switch back and set up Wi-Fi. Or do British carriers not have the 5 GB/mo cap?
depending on what you're getting for that £30/mo, that isn't really that bad, by NA standards... :) I'm currently paying (taxes incl.) CAD$36.10/mo for a 5mbit connection with no throttling, no limitations on time of day, and a 300GB cap. For a few dollars more, I could get the same connection with no cap at all.
It's still far more than I'd be paying in South Korea, or even parts of Europe, but when you compare it against the alternatives in this country, it's actually a pretty good deal. It's all relative, I suppose.
haha, you sound like rik mayall
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Was with Nildram, they got picked up by TT (after a long series of other mergers), service hit the rocks within a week or two, dire throttling issues even on normal use, service not available far too often. After nearly 10 years of service with Nildram and no complaints at all we swapped (*to* Virgin) overnight.
Nildram used to be really good- I formerly recommended it because although not the cheapest, it was reliable and consistently rated very highly by its users. Even after Tiscali took over it didn't go downhill as much as I'd feared.
However, it's now a total dog. The Nildram account I was using had silently been upgraded from 512Kbps to 2Mbps then at some point after the TalkTalk takeover was clearly downgraded to 1Mbps- I know, because I noticed it being slower and checked, and it was consistently just under the 1Mbps mark. This was around the time it started being total fucking shit, with timeouts and other problems happening if you were trying to do too much at once (which wasn't a problem even back when Nildram was 512Mbps).
BTW, Nildram- which was under the "Opal Internet" brand at one stage- is now "Talk Talk Business", so avoid it whatever name it goes under.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Do you capitalize all nouns?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I'm getting a slow connection (1mbps), a 100GB cap, a static IP (which would be £5/mo at least from most providers) and superlative customer service. When I moved house in 2007, Zen social-engineered BT into connecting my line quicker than usual ;-)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Are call centers a new phenomenon to the UK? I find foreign call centers to be commonplace even for small business. It seems virgins call center would be superior to the call center for the sole cable provider in Northern Michigan where they simply read from a generic script.
Do you capitalize all nouns?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apples
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
AAISP has IPv6. I'm switching to them. Had Virgin before - cheap, fast, but crappy and unreliable.
Yes, ADSL is sooo 200x, but Andrews & Arnold is the most competent ISP from what I've heard.
Ah heck, now this made me think of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HilVFpvzuBM
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I've always found Virgin to be a really good ISP... right up until something does go wrong, at which point prepare to get contradictory explanations from everyone you talk to. OK, just my experience, but that's all I have to give!
Ah, but how beautiful would it be if they were "giving up entirely"? Tens of thousands of people in the UK choosing to leave the internet. All at the same time.
Torchwood would get on it and big gay Jack would figure it right out. But only after much tension and drama.
Seriously, all these people left their ISPs because THEY'RE BROKE. They're now all stealing WiFi from their neighbors with open routers.
God bless 'em, every one.
You are welcome on my lawn.
On BT I got just around 2Mbps down and 448kbps up - which frequently dropped to less than 512kbps down and 64kbps up, and dropped out altogether when I used my HF transmitter.
Now I get around 3.7Mbps down and 1Mbps up on Orange, with far greater reliability although I do notice that sometimes the latency is a bit higher. I'm not playing online games that often so that doesn't bother me particularly, and it only seems to be DNS that's particularly affected.
They even manage to be cheaper.
I agree.
I had virgin internet, telephone, and TV for five years in my flat in Edinburgh. I've only ever suffered about one outage a year during that time, and after the first time I learned it was easier and less effort just to turn everything off and try again tomorrow. Definitely easier than fighting their phone "support".
I doubt if this is a distinction between British and American English, anyway. It's more a common colloquialism. As an editor, I am for ever asking authors not to write "Microsoft are doing..." because I prefer to see organizations referred to as single things - distinct from their employees, directors, shareholders, etc.
Books of English usage have always pointed out that both forms are permissible. A standard example is "The Cabinet was united in its decision" versus "The Cabinet were arguing about the matter all day". In the first case, the Cabinet is being treated as a single body, whereas in the second the writer wishes to stress the separate people who are members of it.
Personally, I think this rule would favour "BT is crap", on the grounds that it is the company that is crap rather than its individual employees. Indeed, it is one of the unfathomable mysteries of big corporations that they manage to prefrom so badly when they employ so many talented and hardworking people.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I don't agree with the idiot for picking on your language, but your funny. American's got the Z spellings from the BRITISH English, before it started spelling things with S's like the FRENCH. We got it from you!
I think the key to this is that BT and Virgin are "the two biggest ISPs" in the UK. While the equipment may be the same for most ISPs, the really big ones like BT and Virgin have the worst customer service and the most uncaring attitude. Huge, soulless profit machines.
As a long-term ADSL user living about 4 km (about 2.5 miles) from the nearest telephone exchange, I get a little over 3 Mbps download on a good day. The copper wires and the exchange belong to BT, so no matter what ISP you go with you will always get similar performance as long as you employ ADSL. I started out with Demon, then when that got big and fat and uncaring I shifted to Nildram, and then a few years later to fast.co.uk, a very small ISP with superb customer service. They still can't get me much more than 3 Mbps, though, until BT gets its finger out and lays on FTTC to my house.
All this time, I could have got much faster performance by going to Virgin. Indeed, a few years ago I was a Virgin customer for TV and phone - back then I was using ISDN over cable. But even though I could get up to 50 Mbps within a few days, without paying much more, I refuse to exchange fast.co.uk's excellent and knowledgeable service for Virgin's clowns.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
SKY also has a lock on many channels and HD channels.
So You have to get SKY TV and with SKY TV you get deals to get SKY HSI.
Fixed the title for you.
Virgin, despite seeing sales rise two per cent, saw 36,000 cable broadband customers leaving over the last quarter. In more positive news for the ISP, it saw revenue rise 2.2 per cent.
So revenue rose but number of customers declined by 36,000. That means Virgin raised their rates and 36000 more people than not responded by saying "That's too expensive for me." Add the losses together and that means cable/dsl has gotten too expensive for 191,000 people in Britain. Given the state of the economy, that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
Here in the States, we call that "World Class Customer Service. . . "
. . .with emphasis on World, as in: "Your customer service can come from anywhere in the world!" Of course, this doesn't mean that if you bought a gadget from Sony, your support calls will be routed to an engineer in Japan who helped designed the device and who can speak your language fluently. No, what it really means is that your call will go to wherever is cheapest to outsource the callcenters.
"Only twice" for game that has a major patch about every 4-8 months depending on a cylcle.
I'd call that "they stepped twice on the same rake".
Because they're somewhere in the world, and they really ought to take a class?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sounds like Qwest. Now I know where they learned customer service from.
I'm not saying its acceptable, what I'm saying is that the issue has cropped up about 6 or 7 times so far and most of those have been out of virgins control. Virgin may have stepped on the rake twice, but Blizzard have done a side show Bob.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Easynet now being, of course, Sky Internet!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Tens of thousands of people in the UK choosing to leave the internet. All at the same time.
Actually, it's becoming an interesting choice. I grew up (or rather, I got older) in an age when there was no internet, or even very many computers, but like most of us here have allowed the internet to creep into my headspace. I don't particularly regret that, but it does give a bit of perspective.
I live in Australia, and I seem to have acquired a habit of making lifestyle choices that involve living in locations that are only tenuously served by mobile or satellite internet connections. I don't regret this either, but when your choices are that limited in terms of bandwidth, you do learn to prioritise what you need out of your connection, and your reliance on "analogue" input increases.
I don't do Facebook (perhaps I'm not that social an animal), but I have a select number of "meatspace" friends with whom I keep in touch via phone/Skype/email. But for the most part, I am essentially unplugged from the internet. When I'm in the cities, surrounded by drones clutching their handheld devices with a death-grip, it occurs to me that we need to let go of the Net from time to time if we are to maintain any depth to our consciousness.
I don't agree with the idiot for picking on your language, but your funny. American's got the Z spellings from the BRITISH English...
The jury is still out on the timeline for this, so I won't bother getting into a dispute. But, certainly as far as current usage is concerned, the OED generally gives "...ize" as the orthodox spelling for those cases nowadays. It grates on my nerves a bit, since when I was young the preferred form was "..ise", but I accept that usage changes with the times. Here in Australia, the preferred form is still "...ise", but I dare say that will change in time.
;-)
However, I hope the correct use of the apostrophe in "you're" as a contraction of "you are" doesn't disappear. It is there for a reason.
In German, nouns are typically capitalised (or capitalized). Actually, this was common in English until relatively recently.
..it -is- p2p traffic.
I've been saying for a long time that Virgin's cable network should be regulated by OFCOM and forcibly opened up to competition, like BT's was. I don't give a shit if it hits Virgin's bottom line; it's in the public interest. Seems Virgin are doing their utmost to prove me right.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
However, I hope the correct use of the apostrophe in "you're" as a contraction of "you are" doesn't disappear. It is there for a reason. ;-)
Don't worry, it will be shortened to 'ur' to avoid confusion.
A crumpet is a cheap woman of lose morals.
A bung hole is the hole in the side of a barrel.
I can think of better uses for a crumpet.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Depending on exactly how you define resellers.
What has become increasingly common here in the UK is local loop unbundling. With local loop unbundling BT openreach* owns the physical line but the provider can operate their own ADSL gear. Afaict lines can be unbundled for just ADSL or for ADSL and voice (not sure if they can be unbundled for voice only or for ADSL and voice to different providers). LLU allows providers to avoid the high costs of using BTs ADSL backend network but comes at a price in that. So there are only a handful of LLU providers of which SKY and O2/BE (O2 bought BE but they still operate services under the BE name as we as their own) seem to be regarded as the best.
There are also many BT wholesale based providers but due to the way BT prices access to their backend network these tend to be expensive, congested or both.
* Part of BT but kept somewhat seperate from BTs other operations by the regulator.
Not any more bud.... my ISP http://www.bethere.co.uk/ is now going to roll out VDSL(fibre to the cabinet) to it's customers.
otherwise you are absolutely spot on with the situation apart from sky, their support of horrible..BE's support is stunningly good, free phone and 24/7. i have friends who are with them who are leaving due to their terrible support and coming over to bethere who do not throttle,shape and are truly unlimited.
Bethere (and no i don't work for them) are taking registrations now for the fibre at https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/fibre
with adsl/adsl2+ it's LLU but with FTTC Ofcom call it Virtual Unbundled Local Access(VULA and BT Openreach have named it GEA (Generic Ethernet Access).. same shit.. different label
Meanwhile, BT are not very good either. I have elaborated why here.
You may notice a lot of, shall we say, "psychotic rage". This is not an accident.
I write bullshit
NTL was previously hypothesised as being an experiment in making BT's customer service look good.
Indeed. I gave up my NTL cable and went to (nominally) slower ADSL. The ADSL was slower, but at least it worked for more than 10 minutes a day.
It took NTL 10 months to actually get anything done about the problems with their pathetic service.
Stick Men
kinda but not always.. if Sky do not have their own equipment in the exchange then it's BT equipment all the way .. if Sky have their own equipment in the exchange then they just "rent" the BT line to the exchange and then you're onto their network.
You are spot on however on sky having dire support though
I must be in the minority, since I'd rather snap my cock in two then rub it in broken glass than deal with BT customer service ever again.
The actual ADSL service from BT has been alright. The customer service is fucking terrible. I don't care how shit Virgin can get, BT are worse.
I write bullshit
I'm not saying I disagree, but whats the value you see in this depth?
I suffered BT OpenWound for a few months because my then-job was paying for it. I was amazed at their inability to do simple things like run a DNS server.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I joined them in April this year. I say "joined" - the actual service didn't work until June.
Posted this link already: my funtimes with BT.
Needless to say, not happy.
I write bullshit
Coming from rural Ohio, we don't say "crap," even in polite company. Things instead are referred to as "pieces of shit," as if to say that the items were once part of a greater system of shit.
For example: "This router is a piece of shit."
I thought this made sense until we had a dude from New Zealand in town to do some training. His word usements were similar, but had totally different meaning: Instead of referring to an item to be a piece of some (presumably larger) collection of shit, his manner of speech was such that he would declare the item itself to be an wholly and independently comprised of shit, while saving a few syllables at the same time.
For example: "This router is shit." Or, using a pronoun: "It is shit," or "They're shit."
It's much more direct, easier to say, and makes no presumption about the thing's lineage (but rather only the current state of the thing itself), so I've adopted its usage myself.
I never hear anyone else use it so declaratively. So it's amusing to see folks quibble over the correctness of the roughly-equivalent terms "BT is crap" and "BT are crap."
Kid-proof tablet..
I can't speak for BrokenHalo, but perhaps "value" is the wrong (though telling) descriptor. I'd choose something like "benefit" instead. So in "there, fixed that for you" fashion:
I'm not saying I disagree, but what's the *benefit* you see in this depth?
The benefit is probably similar to what's supposed to happen when taking a vacation. Re-energizing and reconnecting with the world by reducing the frenetic flow of information to a pace we find more natural, and dealing with actual real people rather than one-dimensional (and oftentimes dysfunctional) network personae. Doing something physical and interesting, perhaps, that energizes the body *and* the mind, rather than just the mental thrill of consuming info at internet speed. Stress relief might be another benefit.
My daughter has been attending a summer camp that includes 5 days away from home per session and doesn't permit personal electronics or communication with home outside of snailmail or printouts of emails we send. No facebook, twitter, youtube, texting, phonecalls etc. Lots of activities, though, like swimming, archery, crafts etc. She thought it would be a torture to be disconnected, but after the first week she said she hadn't missed it at all. In fact she didn't even get on the web the first day back - just fired up her ereader and read a book. She was calm and happy until after she got back on the computer and spent half the day doing the usual stuff, then she got more withdrawn and somewhat crabby. I can only conclude that some aspects of being online a lot are stressful and tiring to us, and we don't really notice until we stop for awhile.
Just FYI, Sky Broadband uses the same infrastructure as BT Broadband (both use BT OpenReach cabling). If you find BT laggy at peak times, you'll find Sky just the same.
If they're using Redback edge routers for the BRAS function (and I think they are) they can configure the metering separately for the BT and Sky customers using the virtual routing feature. As long as the link(s) from the DSLAM to the BRAS and the paths from the BRAS to the respective carriers' backbones aren't saturated, the two services don't interfere.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Don't come within 200 miles of me.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I'm sure in the early 20th century the same was said about electricity, that we should take a break from it from time to time.
Perhaps there will eventually be an Interweb-Amish, who pick a random point in time to 'let go' of progressing.
I cannot live without teh interwebz. Thomas Jefferson [sic]
I personally wouldn't generalize too much based off second hand observations like you are, but point taken. The thing that stood out to me most was the benefit of more "dealing with actual real people". Also increased physical activity. Replacing internet with reading novels is an interesting situation though. It leans more towards the frantic information consumption is stressful idea you are talking about. Its a kind of ignorance is bliss effect.
On the contrary, you will find that the Economist Style Guide to which you linked says the same as I did.
But thank you for your delightful and pleasantly worded contribution.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
me or the fibre? LOL
I'm sure it's wrong in any interpretation of English.
Wait... Did I just hear a whoosh?
I am not devoid of humor.
No I sit corrected. It goes to Bathgate too. Bathgate, that well-known centre of technological affairs. [shakes head]
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Bathgate ! ROFL! :P
I am in Edinburgh just off the Royal mile so i am well covered, bear in mind though that the new fibre cabs are all down to bt installing them in the street
Luckily the new cabinet is 2 doors up from my door so i will be able to get some uber speeds.
i remember reading somewhere that Dundee was getting some operator lobbing fibre through the sewers somewhere...... and from what i know of Dundee does that mean just in the streets coz it's a shite hole?!
i take it you are in the highlands or Islands bud?
Why did I say that? Why?! Within an hour I'm back down to 18Kb/s max. How long will it take this time? Three days? Probably. Could anyone who modded me "Interesting" change it to "Funny" please. (In the absence of a "Should-Have-Know-Better-Than-Tempting-Fate" mod option)
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Math ? Is it the science of math or mathematics ? We all have our little idiosyncrasies.
There has been a lot of fibre going in over the last decade, blocking roads in and around industrial estates and the airport. But I've never heard of anyone getting a domestic fibre. It's only been about 5 years since we got ADSL, and on my estate we're getting about 2MB down and 0,5MB up, which is more than adequate.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Has Google TiSP come to Dundee?
http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
A crumpet is a scone/muffin type thing
You are thinking of a strumpet, which is a woman of lose morals.
I'll have you know I have no less an authority the 'Monty Pythons Flying Circus' to back my definition and usage. I believe it was 'the Dirty Vicar sketch.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'