Damn you Virgin Media

2010-04-02T10:18:00+01:00

I'm unreasonably happy this weekend. We had made the right choice to skip the first and last Maelstroms this year. We still have memories of waking up in snow last year. Instead we are looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend of chilling.

After a bit of tweaking we finally got my radio link working (weird routing through the CISCO). Suddenly we are able to stream iPlayer again something that has been next to impossible on Virgin's ADSL link. Luckily as I happen to write the NMS for the radio link so I can actually see what heavy strain iPlayer puts on the link. It turns out not very much, an actual video stream demands less than 2Mb/s while running. According to the router status the physical link is nearly 6Mbs so I can only assume this is due to downstream congestion and/or bandwidth shaping. Considering the amount I've shelled out to Virgin over the last few months I consider it a bit of a rip-off. I am supposedly a couple of rungs up on the allowed download limits which makes no real difference if I can't physically pull that amount through a squeezed data pipe.

Interestingly the data rate for CoD4:MW2 is only around 40Kb/s which includes the voice chat data. I could play OK on the ADSL link but the radio link does improve the ping times by around 40ms which is nice.

Unsurprising

2009-09-14T11:55:00+01:00

The broadband fitting I expected to turn up on Saturday didn't actually materialise. It turns out the automated system got confused by our move from a cable area to a "national" area and went ahead and cancelled one without booking in the other. I'm not totally cut off though, I have an excellent 5 bar + 3G signal in the new house. It does cause Fliss a bit of a problem for working from home until our new ADSL based service arrives though.

It became clear in selecting ADSL we become second class broadband citizens. Our service levels drop from a choice of speeds (5-10-20mb) to "up to 7mb" and a choice of usage caps, in our case I went for the 40gb monthly limit. Hopefully however I'll be able to get an up-link to work on a 10GHz up-link that will put the DSL solution to shame, especially if I'm the only one in the cell.

Otherwise everything is slowly un-boxing and we await the next major delivery of bits and pieces on Wednesday. However undeterred we have already cooked a few meals on a lovely new gas hob, the horrors of the last year and a half on electric hobs now fading into distant memory. Curtains have been installed in key rooms which mean we do get a bit of a lie in when the sun comes up. I cycled in on my new route and found it to be a pretty easy and mostly off-road. We are pencilling in November for a house warming, hopefully we will be fully unpacked by then.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - broadband

Damn you Virgin Media

Unsurprising