Post by Peter JohnsonA neighbour is ditching his Virgin installation in favour of one of
the ISPs offering via City Fibre, don't know which one yet. The
installation was carried out this morning by an an assumed CF employee
in a CF-liveried van, the first time I have seen this. Kelly, the
installation contractor I have seen doing installations before
required two men, and sometimes two vans.
Your neighbour need to beware that none of the ISPs using CF cabling
provide any services other than broadband. They don't off mail or Usenet
handling (not sure about TalkTalk if they appear in your area) so it
will be necessary to use such as Gail, Hotmail or the like. If you don't
want to use them then you would have to use an agent that will charge
you for the services. One of the cheapest and most reliable that I have
been pointed at is Mythic Beasts but I haven't taken the step yet.
Whilst VM are not cheap and their overseas CS script jockeys are
diabolical and often rude, and their annual RPI-adjusted* increases adds
to price, they are probably the most reliable SP on the market. I have
been with them since the early noughties when I was a beta tester of
NTLWorld, but IMSMC correctly we have only had four or five outages in
the intervening years. We had a mail server issue that lasted 24 hours a
few weeks ago, and we lost service for about three days some years back
when some drunken idiot piled his car into the streetcab at the top of
our road. The only other was back in the noughties when we had a frozen
TV picture all day one Boxing Day.
[Most ISP's use CPI+3.9% for the annual increase, whereas VM use
RPI+3.9% - RPI is usually 2.2% or thereabouts greater than CPI so this
year when most people paid an increase of about 14.1% we on VM paid
16.7% or one sixth.]