oh my - the potential for trouble with Juggy and TFW in the same postcode!
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Oxford is expensive to live in and to be honest, a pain in the arse to even visit!
I have been into the centre about three times this year.
Bits of the centre have been mucked about with, if you ever watched Morse, Endeavour or Lewis there would be the occasional shot of Broad Street by car.
No longer a thing
This:
Has been transformed from a £200k a year parking revenue stream to £700k of wooden planters, a cycling superhighway and a performance street arts zone.
There was a performance re-enacting a mugging when I walked through, probably a re-enactment.
It looks like this now (live view)
20 minutes of every hour shows a Diesel tour bus parked next to the seats with the engine running.
We have our own slice of a small village within sight of the dreaming spires, I can see Magdalen Tower from my bedroom window although with all the Orange cranes towering above all it isn’t picture postcard stuff.
If you really want the Oxford experience, crack on, but if you are working in Reading or London regularly Didcot has better rail links.
Oxford station is in bits at the moment I think.
Didcot also has a recently built technical college.
If your boys want to study with a focus on science and business this might be worth a look.
https://www.utcoxfordshire.org.uk/
There are two colleges in the UK with an Electron Microscope, UTC Oxfordshire is one of them.
Thanks MrWitt, we’ve planned to AirBNB for a few weeks, maybe 2 months first to get an idea of where we want to stay. We’ll then rent for a year and buy thereafter. It’s essentially a 5-7 year plan at the moment. The kids will be finished school in 5 years then off to Uni hopefully. When we retire we’ll bugger off to Spain or Greece or similar.
My Ancestral VISA has been approved so we’ll be moving to the UK before the end of November. We should get together for a pint or 2 in the near future.
see you at the LAN in Feb as well ?
Poshibly, depending on where and exact dates.
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Departure day today, landing at Heathrow around 19:50
Exciting
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welcome to the cold and wet land 
It is a wee bit different to Qatar
Is there a computer store in Reading or surrounds?
I need a case, cooler and wireless keyboard. I dismantled my computer to save space and weight
not one that doesn’t require payment in vital organs.
www.scan.co.uk for next day delivery that has been pretty decent the past few orders I’ve made.
DT.
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Thanks DT, I have ordered from them in the past and always had a good experience.
I got what I wanted, delivery tomorrow.
I need some advice regarding fiber broadband.
Who are the best value or does that largely depend on the area you live in?
I signed up with Vodafone for my mobile service which seems OK so far.
I’m looking for a 500mbps service with uncapped FUP.
I’m using Plusnet, haven’t had any issues but would recommend setting some other DNS though as that seems to be a common problem. I set my router to use Google DNS servers.
There is an affiliate scheme, referrer thingy when you sign up - I’ll PM you my username, just in case
DT.
Great, sounds good. Thank you
I use NextDNS to control what my kids can browse and then CloudFlare for the adults.
Seems the service is not very fast in the location we may be renting, can I assume that any ISP service will be the same speed at a specific address?
Wired ISPs fall into 3 categories:
Openreach resellers, basically crap. I’m currently getting 58/15 on that. No other service here yet.
Virgin Media is the old cable company. Highly asymmetric network. I had 360/36 at my last house. Big download offerings, not much upload. Expect 10:1 or worse.
Then we get to new cable installations in recent years. Company that runs the network may be separate from resellers. At my last house CityFibre dug up the road, and Vodafone knocked on my door to sell it to me. I believe it is basically gigabit, but they advertise it as 900M. I never got it as I sold my house around then.
If you’re in rented you’ll likely need landlords permission if installation requires alteration to the property (digging/drilling). Also contracts can be very long so might complicate matters if you’re looking to move again sooner than later.
Edit: just checked in case I was out of date and I might be. Openreach claim to do multiple fibre offerings. I think I’m on “superfast” which is up to 77Mbps. They also list ultrafast which is up to 1000/220 and not available for me. I now wonder if this is the same as CityFibre or separate.
@mackerel thank you for the details. I would probably go with Virgin as speeds under 250mbps would not suffice.
I’ll have to wait and see where we land up living and make a call then.
If you can get fibre not from VM, go that way personally.
The headline speed with VM is hard to beat but the connection has never felt snappy, same rig on its own 80/20 FTTC connection (so copper then fibre from cab onwards) and its been like a breath of fresh air in terms of how snappy its felt; and this is coming from me being on the VM connections for the last 16yrs +
I moved from virgin a good while ago and when I “decomssioned”* it, water ran out of the centre cores of the Coax.
Still tolerating Plusnet Business Broadband, it is closing down soon and I need to pick another provider.
80/20 DSL seems to cater for all I need but it looks like moving provider will cancel the physical phone line provisioning and I will have a IP phone instead
*Decommisioned
To put a spade through the cable at my property boundary, Virgin would not remove the box at the front of my house.
moved off VM as well - the numbers all look good, and then you check the latency due to the amount of compression.
apparently in some areas they are going to move to up and down matching to compete against the new fibre that is being rolled out.
I’ve been all the way up to the max VM package purely to get the upload speed - to get the same upload speed I’m only on 300 down with Plus net fibre (Openreach line)
DT.