:lol: Don’t think I’ll be signing up with vm
I need to have the front garden renovated, either re-gravelled or block paved.
The stumbling block is, about an inch down in the mud, maybe two at most is a Virgin media cable.
I thought as its on my property and unused I could just stick a spade through it and commence refurbishment but apparently not, Its Beardy-Bransons property and mere mortals must not interfere with it.
To get it removed I need to log a ticket, Virgin will not allow me to log a ticket without a customer number, my old one does not exist.
So to get a cable removed that I dont use, I have to pay to become a customer to remove the service I dont use or want 
I hope the cable isnt too badly affected by two tonnes of Mitsubishi being parked on it but as the junction box lost its lid in the storms parking on the cable “might” stop rain running down inside the co-ax.
The cable cabinet is down hill from my house by some margin.
I would tell them about it, but you know, I have better things to do.
As for Plusnet, still Champion, fibre is due this year.
Switched to a new package, saved on the bill AND got a router upgrade for free.
Anyone still living in the dial up dark ages or only having Virgin broadband to choose from might be interested in Gigaclear community broadband, up 100m up and down, ideal for teleworking in your country retreat.
brother in-law has moved to Hong Kong, for £20 a month he has 300Mb up and down 
Yeah but thats just to give the NSA enough bandwidth to keep an eye on him.
Closing the final page on the Virginmedia book of bumper jokes I just drop kicked my VirginMobile over the horizon thanks to This handy guide
How to port your number from Virgin to another provider such as GiffGaff.
Virgin issued the PAC code over the phone and through an SMS so once my shiny new phone turns up, I’m off.
Sorry Mr Branson, its not you, its the assortment of muppets sprinkled throughout your empire that boils my ****.
Just to highlight this I used to get rewards that piled up from spending money with you, every £1000 pounds I spent was worth £100 off an over priced PAYG phone.
Over the years, I’ve had four phones through this and put them all on Virginmobile, then without warning or any form of contact, you stopped the rewards scheme.
So today I was surprised to see £10 of credit has accrued on a scheme you stopped a year ago.
Dear Virgin, see if you can start these well known phrases
— Right hand
— Elbow
— Brewery
:rolleyes:
You guys are lucky with all your options. For an uncapped 40mbps VDSL service we pay around 200 quid or R3800. My home connection is 6mbps uncapped and costs about 50 quid a month. That is internet only, no TV, no phone calls, no nuffink.
I have internet only and Netflix, independant of each other they cost £22/month all in for a 6Mb ADSL link.
Has Cape Town got decent 4G coverage?
I was wondering if a few dozen 4G masts with microwave back-haul would cover the area with less cable to steal than hard wired premises connections.
[QUOTE=MrTFWitt;466521]I have internet only and Netflix, independant of each other they cost £22/month all in for a 6Mb ADSL link.
Has Cape Town got decent 4G coverage?
I was wondering if a few dozen 4G masts with microwave back-haul would cover the area with less cable to steal than hard wired premises connections.[/QUOTE]
Unfortunately not, LTE/3G bandwidth is terribly expensive. Fortunately we don’t have many cable theft issues in and around where I live. The worst problems we have are fiber links being ripped up by farmers or stolen in the outlying areas.
Soon FTTH will be available hopefully. I’ll take a 100/10mbps connection. 100mbps local and 10mbps international. I’ll take all my media services over the wire. At the moment it’s all satellite.
I tried to future proof my last router purchase by buying the MikroTik RB2011 with the SFP port
ARISE Thread of deadness… Shake off those cobwebs and step into the light
Plusnet have gone to shit
https://www.plus.net/business/business-solutions/
" Speed that’s guaranteed
If your speed drops below what we’ve promised and we can’t fix it, you could walk away."
When not spoken by Jason Manford it actually means “If you dont like it , ye can F*** O**”
Imagine you are paying now £48/month for business unlimited Fibre (only FTTC) and getting the best supported rate from the exchange 80Mb/20Mb.
That is adequate and would suffice until FTTP is available.
Without any notice a new package is released “Unlimited Fibre Extra” which has the full 80\20
My existing package which is neither fibre or unlimited now peaks at 40/20.
In addition the mail servers are being shutdown, no hosted email.
I only used it out of laziness and will have to unravel a mess of my own making.
It echo what i have seen elsewhere with the feelings that PS are either about to go tits up or they really don’t want residential customers and they would rather you move to EE.
it took longer than expected for BT to decide to slowly put the nail in the coffin of Plusnet, hence the EE comment as basically Plusnet mobile is EE and guess who owns EE.
BT have slowly removed services from plusnet to allow it to be cheaper than there own offerings for the same alleged speeds. Probably why so much of the advertising was based around no nonsense support and not the actual services. I’ve advised many a client to just call BT, tell them you’re plusnet and then magically BT matches the plus net price. At least then you get some extras, if you can put up with the support lines.
DT.
There seems to be a slippery but inexorable slide into being rubbish across all services that I am using.
My phone, broadband and bank are all on my naughty list for a mixture of reasons but the root cause seems to be just offering less for the same money.
Imagine you have lost a 4g hotspot (well forgotten where it is) that is costing £6/month.
Me : Dear GiffGaff, please stop this payment of £6 on this date of the month.
GG: Please provide IMEI
Me: its lost
GG: Cannot because GDPR
Me : Dear Bank please stop this £6 every month
Bank: You authorised it, ask the supplier
Me : Please stop this payment, I cannot identify it
Bank : OK we have blocked the supplier from taking payment
Now Mine and the kids phones dont work and the bank is ignoring me.
been there - enjoy it when you get bored waiting for a customer to put buy an Ionos product.
So you buy it for them £1.20 won’t break the bank … then the system won’t allow a payment type change, so you’re stumped with it. Then cue Becky trying to match all of the random £1.20 payments on the card to various clients…
Apparently the new secure card stuff rules in UK are different to Germany and where the payment system was original designed for.
I’ve found though, that having a new card due to it “being lost” breaks the payment cycle
DT.
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Continuing the saga of things that don’t work anymore that “Just Worked”
I have had a few Sony Phones, the Sony 750i was a trooper, just worked until the buttons fell off.
Had a few Sony Android phones it would have been just one but keeping a phone in a front pocket whilst hefting heavy stuff about has killed a couple.
My current timewasting device is a Sony Xperia Xa10 BT52 something something and it has worked as An Phone since I got it.
Today I wanted a mug-shot off it so I plug it into USB and expect to see a Drive pop up on the Ubuntu desktop…
NOPE - It is detected but will not allow file transfer, it Used to before Android 12 but now it doesn’t.
The suggested package MPT-Tools doesn’t fare any better
Windows 11 laptop, just pops up and i pscp the files into the right place.
So thank you Sony for going out of your way to break a core feature, interoperability.
Co-Op/Smile you can collect your coat and start walking into the sea.
Without Sony being an arsehole it was potentially a five minute job to open an account with a new bank that has a shiny new branch within 50 miles of my house!
Smile is like a coconut tree, No branches and only good for Nuts.
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haha - all threads seem to end up a TFW rant from WAMT 
In other news, my VM broadband has been solid as a rock, ever since so many local people left VM to go over to FTTP which is now an option here as well since they upgraded the infrastructure late 2022.
VM oversubscribed, nah - never …
DT.
As the candles start to jostle for space on my birthday cake I feel I have earned, with honours, the badge of Grumpy Old Man
See also “Mean Parent” which I am currently seeing as a service level request rather than a complaint.
Shortly there will be TWO teenagers in my house, next summer we go to DefCon-3 on that score.
As for VM, I worked there for a bit doing remote inventory work on routing infrastructure.
It wasn’t much more than doing a cut-n-paste into a word document, zero automation.
I found many bits on the audit for upgrade list had faults, fan failures, PSU issues, high port error rates.
This was of no concern to my steemed colleagues who had an upgrade project to complete, so I carried on cutting and pasting while thinking only of the day rate.
Then I got a bollocking as at some point the document font had changed in my submissions and about 50 needed doing again so I was told to re-do them on the correct form with the correct font.
This annoyed me at a cellular level.
In the character of Scooby-Doo I said Yeah Yeah Yeah and did nothing of the sort just cutn-Pastn ad infunitum and lined up another contract for the end of the month.
On the last Friday of the month, I got called into a meeting room with the snarky team leader and his Boss.
“We have had some complaints about your throughput, you haven’t done any valid audits for two weeks”
“Yes I have, look in my submissions folder there are about 200 awaiting processing”
… Muttering and tapping “Ah yes they are in the wrong format”
“Open one up, lets have a look”
So I ask his boss “Can you see the entire slot population and configuration on page 2”
Yes was the response and Snarky went a little bit purple.
So I broke the silence “I’m only here to cover the workload for a short period which has become two months, my contract is to work with the Unix team on Solaris upgrades which are now in hand, in fact I’m only here because nobody you interviewed wanted to work with you for some reason”
“Well, regardless we are going to have to give you notice” said Snark
In an effort to see if he would go any more purple I said
“I told the agency this cover role was not working out so they asked me to hang on until they could find someone, this news comes as a relief”
“We wont ask you to work your notice period”
I stood up handed him my IDcard and shook the Big Boss’s hand
“Thanks, I’ll just get my keys”
“You will need to use your card to leave the building?”
“No, The turnstiles allow tailgating, The smokers do it in groups, its like the cover of a Madness album sometimes”
Snarky and his underling, Captain of the Font Police were both heavy smokers.
So in essence, VM wanted a reference library for something that was going to be changed making the library obsolete, gave not a toss that much of the estate was knackered.
Just as long as the configuration was presented in a table using 11.5 point Helvetica-vesuvius nothing else mattered, people would phone in with faults and would be told “Reboot your router”.
Only if enough people phoned in would anybody think of looking further
“What do they expect for £50/Month?”
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Had Full Fibre (1000 down 110 up) to my home from BT for 3 to 4 years now seems ok and no problems.
Plusnet is DEAD to me.
I had a Plusnet Business account, if I was residential it would still be working.
Plusnet Business is closing and customers are being moved to BT Business and get a magic Digital Voice service, even though I’m using the same mouldy copper line from the 1950’s.
I spent 20 minutes never to be regained talking to a mouth breather about how I would get a better Fibre service from BT Business.
FTTC and FTTP are not the same, BT Sales don’t seem to know WTF they are selling
Moving to BT fibre will increase your speed to Elevnty1
I do not have a fibre connection
Yes you do, your contract says Fibre.
No it says FTTC, Fibre to the cabinet.
Yes, Fibre
No, Fibre to the cabinet is not the same as FTTP Fibre to the premises as in house.
Oh, OK, are you sure you cannot get full fibre ?
I can get Full Fibre from Virgin but that is an all day service, it falls over due to poor infrastructure.
Have you used the BT Full Fibre Checker ?
I have, it said not available, I even tried three shredded wheat for a fibre boost, the speedchecker still said it was slow, the rollout checker says “about five years mate” and that is that, even Gigaclear dont want to know.
Oh, we will send you a new smart hub anyway.
Dont bother, as I’m using a phone line I might as well use what I already have
OK, we will switch you over and email you connection details.
Can you guess just how well this will go ?
In an ideal world, I would just use ZEN and move the BT number to a VOIP service.
Yeah, about as far from “well” as it is possible to get.
Slower than expected
More expensive than discussed
Home Phone worked to a mobile app not a physical handset, then stopped completely after an update of the shitty app…
On a BT smarthub there is a single analog phone socket.
If the same hardware is supplied to a business account, this socket is disabled and does not provide service.
Now with ZEN.
Installation of ZEN
1 Unplug BT shite
2 Plug in FrtizBox (Its German you know)
3 Plug in DECT base station for “landline” phones
4 Plug Draytek into Fritzbox
That was it, BT gone, phone and internet working Grrrrrreat!
I didn’t have to speak to anyone or muck about with settings
BT has lost the plot completely and I hope they get bought up by CityFibre
just imagine being a pro-gamer, having a scheduled game and the BT internet crapping out.
Ring support, it’s a line fault, nothing we can do our end. He rings me, errm, that’s crap as you have a sync light but no DNS. While on the phone as I’m starting to go into how to change the DNS on the BT hub, the beep of incoming call …
BT - aren’t we great, we fixed it - we will send you a new router anyway, which I translated as, we’ve placed a new router order and it looks bad on my support if I cancel it.
Muppets
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