Chris Boyle ([info]shortcipher) wrote,
@ 2007-08-20 13:35:00
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Current mood: annoyed
Current music:Sting - Little Wing
Entry tags:cambridge, geek, rant

We have Normality
I hate wasps. There was a nest (possibly under construction) in the wall near an air vent in the bedroom; wasps were going in and out of the outside surface of it fairly constantly. I was stung thrice; the first sting was on my left wrist and woke me up at 6am on Saturday. I had nothing in the house and had to drive to Tesco to get something to treat it (which obviously took a while), so my hand has since blown up like a balloon. It's now very slowly deflating, but I'm still having to type this one-handed. In related news, I can recommend Cambridge Environmental Services for all your wasp-poisoning needs; they were effective, prompt and professional. :-)

Also, we lack many things at Normality, including internet access. We're considering Sky broadband (ADSL available to Sky TV customers for £5 - 10 /month), since we might want Sky anyway, but I hear scary things about 100:1 contention ratios and incompetence. Is there anyone reading who has used them and can (dis)recommend them? Also Virgin broadband (cable, formerly NTL), same question, especially anyone with recent experience of them. I always used to hear very variable reports of NTL and its outage frequency, but outages, when they happened, seemed fairly universally to last days rather than hours, which, if it's still true, is probably a deal-breaker for me. This would therefore mean ADSL, since I don't know anyone else doing cable in Cambridge (please correct me if I'm wrong). The question then would be whether to get it from Sky or not: obviously the price is attractive, but I'm worried that you get what you pay for.

Edit: thanks for all the information; we're going with Sky broadband (just as soon as our phone line has been activated for long enough to be ADSL-capable, grrr)


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[info]hairyears
2007-08-20 01:53 pm UTC (link)
Virgin Broadband are still NTL. Which means day-long outages - about every six weeks or so, it's two nights running - and their customer service sucks like an armless man retrieving lost golfballs in an Essex nudist colony.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]deborah_c
2007-08-20 02:24 pm UTC (link)
You must be in their higher-quality-of-service area, judging by my experience (see below...)

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[info]ewx
2007-08-20 05:39 pm UTC (link)
My experience of NTL/Virgin differs; not that they have 100% uptime, but 48-hour outages every six weeks is way, way outside my experience (of several years now). A few hours every 3-6 months would be closer.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]deborah_c
2007-08-20 02:23 pm UTC (link)
My old house had NTL. When working, it was by and large fine. However, they mixed outages of a couple of hours with outages of a week; their tech support, when this happened, were utterly clueless, and would refuse to do anything but read from a script. (No, rebooting the computer is unlikely to make the modem that can't find a signal to sync to suddenly spring into life. And no, it's not running Windows, anyway...) Often, it took an hour on hold in a (paying) queue on a premium line to get to talk to someone in any case.

The business people, however, managed to make tech support look clueful. Cancelling services took months or *years* to get them to stop billing for things they'd already ceased service on; no one would take responsibility for anything, and we still haven't managed to persuade them (more than a year after moving out) to change the account to have my ex's name on it.

My impression from talking to other people is that the Virgin Media incarnation has somehow managed to achieve the impossible, and make all this worse. When I moved to Carlton Way, I had ADSL installed, despite there already being cable, but not BT service, and despite the considerably lower data rates achievable that way. (Arbury has peculiarly inconsistent and poor phone cabling installed, with long runs to the exchange; ADSL Max can't manage more than 2Mbits/s to my house, and for a while they expected even less than that.)

I'm very happy with my ADSL provider (except that sometimes it would be nice to have a bit more bandwidth, but still) but haven't used Sky.

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[info]briggsy
2007-08-20 03:05 pm UTC (link)
From a Bar Hill perspective:

Virgin Media do have the once every couple of years "down for a week" issue and the twice a year "nothing for a day" incidents, but when it works it works well, and you can get very good datarates most of the time that are what you are paying for. Also they're going to be 4Mbit/8Mbit/20Mbit very soon.

Their 2 for £20 or 3 for £30 deals are also quite cost effective. A tenner a month for actual 4Mbit is pretty good in my book. Always worth seeing if they have any new customer offers too.

I've never been impressed by ADSL the few times I've used it, it's always been laggy, slow and prone to annoying delays especially at peak times.

It's quite possible that the town service is much worse of course.

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[info]hairyears
2007-08-20 04:12 pm UTC (link)
As for the other issue - wasps nests - calling the council is the way to go. Most DIY stores sell a 'Wasp Nest Destroyer' product but using it without a experience and safety gear is a really, really bad idea.

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[info]sonicdrift
2007-08-20 07:42 pm UTC (link)
I'm in Arbury and have got sky. I haven't had any problems with them, other than a week or so when everything went very slow in the evenings. I did have NTl/Virgin, but their billing system never managed to charge me the right amount and their customer service was horrendous.

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[info]lizzip
2007-08-27 12:09 pm UTC (link)
f00l.

Vinegar works on wasp stings; bicarbonate of soda is apparently good for bees, but those are more complicated because the sting must first be extracted with tweezers *without* squeezing the remaining poison out of the sac and into one's body in the process...

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