Reply to post: Re: As always...

Re: As always...

Meanwhile, due to fuck-knows-how, I'm rocking a 100 MBps (because it's the basic entry-level connection from Virgin on fibre) in the arse end of Birmingham where you could buy a street for the cost of one Harrow house.

At my parents house out in the rural Cotswolds getting a mobile signal indoors (even 2G) on any network is very unlikely. I'm sure they'll improve things when they get all this lovely spectrum though. However their village has been fibred up with FTTP available for everyone. I won't name the company but they must have spent a bit doing that. There may of course have been some subsidy or other to soften the blow. A sales rep came to the door and spoke to my mum before Easter about the service. I was there but as it's not my house I decided I wasn't going to speak to her. The rep checked to see if they'd noticed the (vast) amount of work that had been going on to make this possible. They certainly had as it had been going on for a while and required digging up the road in one or two places as well as the verge.

The next questions were about whether they noticed many problems with their existing broadband. The rep wanted to know:

Sales rep: Do you have problems with the speeds on your current copper based broadband?

Mum: I don't think so everything loads quite quickly

Sales rep: Do you suffer much from buffering?

Mum: is that the same as buffeting because if so only when it's windy

Sales rep: Er no it isn't

Mum: Oh then I don't think so as I don't know what it means.

Sales rep: Do you get pauses when watching tv online or videos on demand

Mum: No we watch TV on the Television that's what it's for and not the computer. We can pause the videos of our grandchildren on Whatsapp though.

Sales rep: Do you do much on-line gaming?

(this is to someone who is north of 70 so whilst not impossible, fairly unlikely she's up with a headset on gamepad/mouse in hand till all hours)

Mum: Well I play Sudoku and Solitaire on my phone

Sales rep: Well You might be interested in our fibre broadband packages which start from as little as £40 and can give you speeds of 50Mbps

Mum: Is that good?

Sales rep: It's very competitive at that price and we can go up to 1Gbps for a bit more

Mum: Do I need that to online shop?

Sales rep: You can also get your phoneline and number ported over to our VOIP partner

Mum: What's VOIP is that anything to do with a mobile signal because we don't get a very good signal here.

Sales rep: No it's through your broadband connection and is only around £8 a month.

Mum: Will the burglar alarm work on that too especially when the power has gone out.

Sales rep: Erm I don't think so

Mum: Oh well then we'd need to keep the BT line too.

Sales rep: Maybe I can just leave you with some literature and my card and if you'd like to go ahead let me know.

Mum: That's fine,

Sales rep: Bye... (almost running up the drive to escape the luddite OAP)

Afterwards we looked at the costs of this service which came in as follows:

All the installation and one off fees came to £420. Higher cost because the house is more than 10m from the connection point and it will require a lot of internal cabling etc.

The cost of the service would be £615 over the life of the contract with another £100 if they took the VOIP.

So that's £1135 plus the cost of the burglar alarm land line. They both looked at it carefully for a few seconds before deciding they'd rather spend the money on something else.