
UK's Version of T-Box?
Telstra T-Box - available in Australia to Telstra BigPond customers - a twin-tuner, 200GB, DVR/STB with IPTV/VoD built in. Nice interface, great idea and looks good on paper. But that's the good part. The bad? It's &#^@$%^ frustrating to own and operate (excuse the muffled expletive, but I can't communicate my true meaning without it)! Many of them, including mine, are as unreliable as hell - the EPG drops programs regularly, only partly re-loads itself, and sometimes stops updating altogether, which means scheduled recordings just stop - with no ^%*!%@ warning. Then there's the unresponsive remote, system freezes, soft reboots, hard reboots and sometimes a mandatory manual reboot to get it back to working order. How often, you ask? With my system, something happens every ^#$&*@^ day!! Oh, sure, customer service is there to "help you through the problem", but that's not going to fix the firmware is it? As someone on Whirlpool put it, when they asked for advice on what to try next with their faulty remote, "Shove it sideways up a certain Telstra product manager's ****!"
Maybe part of the blame lies with NetGem, who made the underlying Linux box, or maybe it's the application developer, or something else. In any event, I sincerely hope that the BT box turns out a hell of a lot more reliable than the T-Box.
PS: I love Linux and have used it for many years, but that doesn't mean that everything that runs on Linux is good.