The Clymo Brief: Battling for broadband
Ta da! The ridiculously monikered Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has called for a review of broadband services here in the UK. Does that mean anything will actually happen? Haven’t we been here before? I think we know what the problem is. They’re rubbish! Compared to places like Japan and South Korea we’re in the dark ages.

I’d love a better broadband supply piped into my home. It’s just not happening. The announcement grabbed my attention alongside another story I read that BT and Microsoft were planning an exciting collaboration. The idea is to provide BT’s Vision home entertainment service via the Xbox 360 games console and I’m looking at it with eager anticipation. That’s mainly because I’ve relocated and been in a major quandary about how to get a decent evening of TV.
It all started after we moved house and realised that the people who sold us the new place had snipped the aerial cable in half when they signed up for cable from Virgin. Needless to say, we have nothing that remotely resembles a picture. So maybe the BT/Microsoft collaboration could be just the thing I’m looking for?

Of course, the press blurb sounds fabulous. “A powerful, all-in-one entertainment experience” that promises high-definition gaming, television, movies and all by the middle of this year. It’s not really a revelation as BT Vision is already powered by Microsoft’s Mediaroom Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) platform. You’ll obviously need an Xbox and BT Broadband though, while the service is augmented by features like Xbox LIVE Marketplace with the ability to send and receive chat and text messages too.

But with a lack of digital TV tuner inside the Xbox you won’t be able to receive or record live telly without the aid of BT’s V-box digital recorder that comes as part of the Vision package. That’s a bit naff. Watching ‘near live’ Premiership footie games via BT’s 242 service is strange too. I’ll remember to nearly cheer when my team hits the back of the net then.

More importantly, will it work at all? I’ve got BT’s Total Broadband package and when I signed up for it at my old address it was pretty fast. Now, because we’re farther away from the exchange it fluctuates and generally peaks at 2 megs tops. The minimum requirement for BT Vision is 2 megabytes or faster. Which is where I sense the problems may start. Surely a fast and efficient connection is essential for this service to succeed? What happens if you’re getting a borderline service like me? That takes us into territory which will be very familiar to anyone who’s ever signed up with an internet service provider.
More to the point, it’s only once you’ve locked yourself into an ISP’s minimum contract that the technical headaches usually begin. I had to face the BT call centre myself recently and it wasn’t nice. All was well until the dreaded house move. I called BT to notify them, and while I was on the phone, agreed to an 18 month contract term, extended from 12 because there were some discounts thrown in. Soon after moving I started getting random disconnections. A string of calls to BT found me being told to check my modem settings, reset it, take the cables out, plug them back in again and so on. The modem worked fine at my old address. I left it at that after being told to “monitor it” for 3 days. Curiously, the service rectified itself in the meantime.

Then I needed to update my card payment details online. A few days later I got a letter saying that the information had been accepted and I didn’t need to do anything else. Two days after that I got an email from BT saying that my bill hadn’t been settled and I could face a charge of £7.50 for late payment. I phoned BT again. After 20 minutes of waiting a guy denies that they sent a letter and there’s no direct debit in place either. I offer to fax him the letter I’m holding, he gets in a bit of a tizz and tells me he’ll call me back on my mobile in five minutes. I never did work out why he couldn’t just call me on my BT line. It turned out that someone had cancelled my amended instruction and there was now no automatic billing in place. Back to square one.
It’s no different with other providers either. My girlfriend previously had an account with, ironically, Virgin and had to endure six months of abject misery talking to their call centre staff about being wrongly billed. In that case we won’t be signing up with Sir Richard’s mob either. I can see why people have such contempt for telecoms companies with their confusing, poorly performing packages and shabby customer service. One look at the comments on the Tech & Gadgets message boards will confirm as much. I love the concept behind this BT/Microsoft collaboration, I just don’t think it’ll work and I’m probably not alone in feeling that way. It’s not surprising then that hardly anyone has touched the undersubscribed BT Vision and maybe even less will bother with the Xbox idea.

I’m willing to be convinced otherwise though… I made numerous calls and sent several emails to the BT press office hoping that they would do just that, but got no conclusive reply aside from a generic press release. Microsoft had nothing to add either following the press announcement they made at the Consumer electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. I guess that means we’ll just have to see what transpires come the middle of this year.


Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
Microsoft owns MSN UK and Xbox.