What Happened Next - The Installation Experience

The following events took place between 5pm and 6pm on Tuesday 27th April 2010...

Well - the hourly "24"-style postings went out the window when VirginMedia man cut our phone line without telling us. There was a moan of anguish from the children's study, and there's a Service Delivery Manager who probably thinks I buggered off half-way through a conversation on OCS over the VPN. There was always going to come a point where they had to move the phone line over, but telling us would have been nice.

So - the cabling went in fine, and we now have a little white box on the wall. It's not quite level, which is a bit annoying. When the furniture is finally all put back, hopefully no-one will see it. He didn't expect to have to do all the cabling, so the job took longer than he anticipated, and he was late and flustered. Phone line came back up OK, and he fitted the V+HD box. He left the protective film on the front. The "birds nest" behind the AV stack is even worse now - there's a coaxial cable coming out the bottom of the white box, and that goes to a splitter, which is sort of in mid-air behind the TV - the split cables go to the V+HD box, and the cable modem.

Oh yes - the cable modem. I had a perception that there would be some sort of whizzy VirginMedia cable modem/wireless router sexy black box with coloured lights on it. No. You get a Cisco 2100 cable modem, and a D-Link DIR615 Wireless-N Home Router. The cable modem has Ethernet and USB outputs. He connected our laptop up to the Ethernet port on the cable modem, brought up a webpage and tada! He went to a speedchecker page and it said we were getting 9.6mbit. Wow. That is over twice as fast as we're used to. For the first time in a very long time, we're actually getting what we pay for.

Getting the line/TV activated took a long time. I've read posts elsewhere about the engineer phoning Virginmedia as soon as they arrive on-site because they know they're going to queue for 30+ minutes. I think our guy had that 30-minute experience, but he didn't phone in on arrival - I guess he was thrown by the cabling thing.

I had to ask him to give me a quick guided tour of the V+HD box, and he did. I had to ask specific questions like "Where's BBC iPlayer?". So he answered my questions, and then left. Situation is that the TV is on, the phone line is up - the house has no Internet access. I don't think the TV picture looks that great, so I start delving quickly into the setup menus. He's left the V+HD pushing out a 720 picture. I change the setting to 1080p. Looks a lot better now. Would have been nice if things had been left set optimally.

VirginMedia man was in a rush - he had another job to do. He left empty cardboard boxes, old cables and ties, and packaging in the sitting room. He advised me that I'll be receiving a Customer Satisfaction Survey, and that his bonus was tied to it.

We did run out of power sockets - he made the decision to disconnect the Nintendo Wii. Didn't ask, didn't tell - I followed the cables back and then noticed the lack of red light. So we do have a problem - at least for now - with power sockets.

It's 5:45pm. The children have GCSE and A-Level coursework and studying that they need to do. They need Internet access for that. Homework needs to be printed out. The printer is connected to a print server in the study, which is off the back of the Netgear router - also in the study - where we are rich in power sockets.

I try for a quick win. The reasoning goes like this... the cable modem is pushing Internet access out of its Ethernet socket. When you connect a laptop to that socket, it gets assigned a Class A address and WORKS. So - what if I connect that Ethernet port to the wall socket behind the TV - it's then on our home network. Nope - doesn't work. There's no manual for the Cisco cable modem. No CD - just a plain white box. I connect the laptop back to the modem and go to the Cisco website. I'm wondering where the laptop is getting it's IP address from - perhaps the modem has a DHCP server. Nope - modem has nothing - it's just a modem. No admin UI - nothing to change or set. So plugging a modem with a Class A address onto a network populated with Class B addresses is never going to have a good outcome.

I need to make a decision - it's an easy decision, but it's annoying. I've got to get everything back up and running - so I'll have to skip the training course. :(