Amazed that in the middle of the breakdown of society in Libya they seem to have a better internet connection than Virgin Media can manage in Sussex.

What can I say?  It was payday this week so I was feeling artificially flush, and its only an extra fiver a month, which I don’t mind since my phone/TV/broadband bills went down by over £15 when we moved so I’m still winning.

Mind you, the wireless N networking should come in handy for Jayne’s connection to the router – though I have a feeling the kids’ laptops only have wireless G so they won’t feel all the benefit.  I intend to stay connected with CAT5 so none of that matters much to me.

Be interesting to see where the difference is most noticeable.  I think the upstream speed is higher than now as well, so possibly I’ll notice that more when uploading photos, and I’m hoping Jayne will wave goodbye to lagging on World of Warcraft.

I’m not even sure what one of them is, but the inner geek is getting twitchy.  I think it is just a combined modem and router, and I quite like keeping those things separate. It has wirelass N on it too, which my current router doesn’t, but since I connect by cat-5 cable that doesn’t bother me, and it has DOCSIS3 which won’t matter unless and until the bandwidth approaches 100MB…   On the other hand, one less thing plugged in.  I’ll think about it, but the danger is that I’ll get carried away and just go straight to 50MB.

The other thing I found out because Virgin sent out an advertising email – TiVo.At first I couldn’t see the point.  I already have V+ which will record stuff for me.

Then I looked at the promotional film and I can see that it does more than the V+ but nothing that I would use, so while it is quite impressive it leaves me personally quite unenthusiastic.  I think it is aimed at people who watch a lot more TV than I do and who want to watch even more.  I have all but given up on my resolution to watch more TV already.

Actually, it isn’t clear whether this Virgin TiVo box does the thing that V+ does and that makes V+ better than Sky+ – record two things at the same time while you watch a third thing.  If (and it is a really big if) I decided to pay a monthly subscription for something I would want to make sure I didn’t lose that capability that the current free service has.

As long as I can force myself to ignore the fact that this new box has a 1TB hard drive, compared to the 30MB of the V+ box (probably. I can’t remember) I think I can safely ignore this particular temptation.

I’m feeling quite positive about Virgin Media at the moment.  I had some problems last year, or maybe the year before, which coincided with them starting to charge for tech support calls, but those charges disappeared and everything has been working fine for ages.  Added to that, when we moved house  we somehow ended up with all the same services but a monthly bill about £20 lower.

The icing on the cake was when, more than 3 months after moving in, we got round to connecting up the extra box and found we had lost the remote for it.  Jayne phoned and asked about a replacement and was told it would cost £12 so she told them not to bother and they said OK we’ll just send you one for free then.

I’m sure they will get the money back off me eventually, because when my Vodafone contract runs out I’ll probably go for a Virgin Blackberry and ditch the tax-dodging Vodafone.  Unless it turns out that Virgin are dodging even more tax than Vodafone of course.

Having said that, I wish they would spend less time moaning about it and a bit more on expanding their fibre optic network to places like Maidenbower and Horsham.   If Virgin don’t have cable in your street, then there really is no competition – all the different providers are going to be using the same infrastructure to provide broadband.

When so much of Crawley is cabled up and can get 50MB broadband it is very frustrating that the next town across has to rely on BT’s copper, and even the Maidenbower estate within Crawley isn’t all fibred up.  I

So in the case of Virgin Media and our 10 Megabit per second (Mbps) product, we are providing 8.7 out of that, so that’s 87%. That’s nearly 90% of the actual speed we are advertising, so in our case, yes, people are getting as close to that speed as possible.

Where do I start?   You have to appreciate the attempt at sleight of hand with 8.7…  that’s 87%…  which is nearly 90%… which is nearly 100%     I would like to see him visiting the doctor to be told his temperature is 38.8, which is as good as 37 which is NEARLY 40 DEGREES! Call an ambulance!

As for the assertion that 90% is as close to 100% as possible…  has this man never heard of, say, 91%?

What he says is probably true.  You would have to be blindly optimistic to expect the full possible speed on your connection unless you were downloading files from your ISP’s own server, connecting to your modem via ethernet, not sharing your connection at all, and certain there was nothing running in the background, but that doesn’t excuse teh sloppy maths.  These days it feels like 100% is taboo: it is either “90% is as close to 100% as possible” or “I’m giving 110% effort”

Sounds like a minor quibble, but part of the deal from Virgin is free online storage for backups.  They make a lot of noise about being able to download an album in 11 seconds or an entire HD movie in 15 minutes – but if you wanted to then backup that movie it would take 8 hours…

Maybe we are still too busy playing with all the great stuff that large bandwidth enable to think about potential next-big-things that can’t happen even at 1.5Mb.   It is true that most demand is for downstream capacity – making streaming HD video possible,  removing the annoying buffering delays on TV-on-demand, playing high-res online games, and so on – but a lot of that only came about when the infrastructure made it possible.

So what uses would high capacity upload be put to?   If I knew that I would be making a fortune doing it, but when it happens no doubt it will all seem obvious in hindsight.  The obvious one would be high resolution or HD web cams making decent desktop videoconferencing possible, and I bet somebody would come up with some impressive peer-to-peer console games.

We have now been without internet access at home for 5 days, and do not expect to get it back for another couple of days.   When it does come back it is going to take quite a while to go through the backlog of e-mails and all those RSS feeds on Google reader.

Just in case anybody thought I had died or something.

Anyway, it took me forever to get everything copied across to the new computer.  Being able to have the old and new computers running together, and connected through the LAN should have made it straightforward, but it still dragged on – all those gigabytes of photos and music to move, all those settings for three different browsers and e-mail, all those obscure applications to re-install.

I like to know that the applications I use are here under my desk and under my control and would feel uneasy relying on applications on the Internet and even less easy if all my files were on servers all over the world, but it wouldn’t half make migrating to a new computer easy!   I am seriously thinking about the halfway house measure of getting a networked 1TB hard drive and keeping everything on there so that in future I can just plug into that from a new PC.

It does not help that so much of the setting up now relies on an Internet connection whether it is to download patches or programs or just to register them after installation – or even just to look up help on what to do.   Yesterday I was planning to do the last bits of setting up, but in the afternoon somebody who probably got their driving licence from a cornflakes packet managed to take out broadband (and cable TV) for half of Broadfield by crashing a car into one of Virgin Media’s roadside boxes and completely flattening it.

Fair play to Virgin Media, they did have it all up and running by the next morning.  Their engineers were still out there working on restoring a service at two in the morning, but it was a bit personally frustrating.

Looking on the bright side…  in a fit of optimism I installed iHPtools on the new computer and it worked.  For some reason it would not work on the old XP machine but is fine under Vista, so now I can go back to using that to set up playlists on the trusty old iRiver.