The Clymo Brief: Giving the V to broadband
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Following my recent column about the woeful state of broadband and ISPs, things have been looking up. After my problems with BT Total Broadband, I got in touch with Virgin Media who turned out to be really helpful.

They were very keen to redress the problems my girlfriend suffered with the cable package at her old address. Those were dark days for her, consisting of endless conversations with the call centre and a weird tandem billing set-up that spirited money out of her account in a ghostlike fashion. Things came to a tearful climax with a terse letter from some debt collectors, even though she had already settled the account after ditching the service altogether.
Needless to say, I wasn't convinced I wanted to become embroiled in a similar scenario at our new address, but we were still without a decent TV signal thanks to a snipped aerial cable. Added to that, the BT Total Broadband I’d rolled over from my old address had dropped in speed and the connection was horribly erratic.

Any chance of getting the BT Vision home entertainment package, which looked worth a shot initially, was clearly out of reach. Virgin offered us a three month broadband trial for starters. After some deliberation, I asked if I could also pay for the TV option to be added on as their V+ box looked pretty interesting too.

After chatting to a helpful lady called Dorothy at Virgin HQ, we firmed up a date for the engineer to come round. In the following days I received a steady stream of brightly coloured letters from the Virgin people. ‘Welcome aboard’. ‘You’re in!’ Oh, and ‘Please send us your bank details!’ I was getting nervous. Many people had previously told me the Virgin service is fine in itself; it’s the billing side of things that seems problematic. The most popular theory being that it’s a hangover from the days when the whole shebang was run by ntl.
The waiting kills me though. It’s the same as when you’re hanging around for a package delivery. You know it’s coming – you just don’t know when. Every voice and slamming car door makes you leap off the sofa for an eager peek through the nets. Virgin Media sent me a text reminder though and the engineer also rang just after 9am to check I’d be in. Later in the day he arrives and gets to work while I put the kettle on. An hour or so later and he’s done. The TV works and so does the broadband on a Windows laptop and an Apple Mac desktop machine.

Uploads and downloads seem speedy enough, and the connection never drops. I can walk away from my desk, have a bite to eat and come back safe in the knowledge that it will still be connected. Whenever I did that with Total Broadband, the BT connection would go AWOL. All this gets me thinking…
Have your say on the message board: what do you think of UK broadband services?
A couple of days later and I’m on the phone to BT. It seems daft that Virgin can provide me with a service that they can’t, so perhaps they’d be reasonable enough to terminate my contract. I’m happy to keep my landline but not to pay for broadband that isn’t very broad at all. For once, I manage to get through relatively easily but it’s not the answer I’m after.

“So you’re saying it’s running slow?” asks the Scottish woman on the other end of the line when I explain there’s no way it’s fast enough for me to get something like BT Vision, which requires a minimum 2MB connection speed to work. Seems I can ditch the broadband and just keep the phone, but I’ll have to pay for the privilege. “I’ll be honest with you, the contract will stand. The only thing you can do is speak to technical help.”

I’ve done that and they couldn’t.
“Sometimes it’s not possible. Unfortunately, as I’ve already said, if you were to release the broadband you would still be in the contract term. You’re in contract until December, so it would work out around £141 to cancel.”

I explain that the whole reason I signed up to this service was that they promised up to 8MB. While I understand this can fluctuate wildly especially if you’re further away from the exchange, which I am now, I can’t fathom why I have to pay the same amount for a service that isn’t much use.

“Well, as I said, the contract obviously stands,” repeats the Scottish woman sounding slightly tetchy. “Do you want me to give you the technical help number? If they can’t help you and you still want to cancel then you’ll have to take it from there.”
So, now I’m sitting here able to hook up to the internet via both Virgin Media and BT Total Broadband. I don’t mind paying for a service that works but this is ridiculous. My reason for staying with BT in the first place was that they own the phone network infrastructure so the service should be dependable. It’s a theory that has backfired badly.

For my money, the cable coverage round here seems to give Virgin the upper hand. I’m not looking for a lightning fast broadband connection, just a decent, reliable one. Now I’ve got two. Well, one and a bit until December…


Recent columns from Rob Clymo:

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The burglar-beating spycam

All of Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets

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.