[Wolves] Thoughts on Virgin Media?

[Adam Sweet]

Hi everyone, thanks for your thoughts. Sorry to reply to my own post
without any quoting instead of replying to each within the thread, I've
been flat out for a few days and there are now too many replies to make
individually. Also apologies for asking so many questions all at once.

Sadly it turns out that even though I thought I was in a cable area, I'm
not so it's now a moot point.

To respond to a few individuals though:

@ Gareth: Yeah Phorm stinks, seriously, but I have faith that it will be
deemed illegal or Virgin will back out. If it goes live then I will use
the Firefox dephormation plugin and jump ship again at the earliest
opportunity.

I was on Enta business ADSL, for which I had a business line installed
(and thus had the wiring to my house replaced). I was happy with them
but they did seem to have quite a lot of short outages. I've been told
that Enta (who only sell through resellers) commonly have 6 of their
resellers in the top 10 most reliable ADSL ISPs. I didn't go with an
Enta reseller when I returned to my private line because all Enta
resellers required an activation fee, whereas F2S didn't.

@ Dave Goodwin: I think Sky/Easynet and TalkTalk do LLU on my exchange
(http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/CMFOR) but I can't see how
shifting providers is going to solve my problems with the line quality
and I suspect I may get similarly low throughput even on an LLU deal due
to the line quality.

I may however try to play Sky and Virgin off against each other, I'm
told they'll be all over me as I'm a 'greenfield opportunity'.

@ Zeth: I only plan to host a backup MX for mail which will deliver to
my primary mail server, so I can whitelist it on my primary mail server.
My primary mail server is a hosted VM.

@ Peter Cannon: Never one to miss a trick eh my old son? :) I host my
mail on my own VM.

@ Mez: Thanks for the pointer, WebTapestry sound like they know what
they're doing. I'll investigate that one.


Essentially I was looking at cable as a means of circumnavigating what I
believe is dodgy telephone wiring either inside my house, between my
house and the exchange or just in the area in general as the problems
with my ADSL line are recurring every few months despite a replacement
cable to my house and a new master socket, which changing ADSL provider
won't solve, though other ISPs may be more willing to investigate.

Having replaced my modem and removed all extraneous wiring I'm not sure
what else to do and BT won't help me until I get below 64KB/s. I'm also
told by a few people that for what I pay for ADSL + phone line + mobiles
I could save a reasonable amount by changing to cable and my mobile
contract is up soon.

What I think I'm going to do, is give my line 10 days to see if it will
sync back up to a more reasonable speed (my profile was set to
'interleaved' last time I had problems, which is more stable on poor
quality lines than in 'fast' mode, but takes 10 days to re-sync back up
after a speed dip, whereas a 'fast' profile syncs back up within 3
days), if not then I will contact my ISP to see if they will do anything
about the problem. If it's not solved by the time my mobile phone
contract is up then I'll jump ship to another supplier.

Thanks to everyone once again.

Ad