V+ Good News, Bad News

Another week of getting to know V+. I don't remember if I mentioned it, but we had a briefly frustrating game of "Hunt the BBC iPlayer" the other day. The answer is that from the main menu, it's 2,2,1. It took a while, though. I looked in the manual and found an alternative way of getting there - but it was James that bagged the 221 solution. OK...

Good News: Old Skool VCR - this week, I wanted to do a bit of Old Skool timer recording. We wanted to record the Government press conference on the BBC News channel. As far as I know, there aren't discreet programmes on this channel - it's just 24x7 news. So I wanted to record from 2pm to 4pm in order to catch the bit we wanted somewhere in that window. V+ lets you do that - you can specify date, start and stop times and channel to record - just like a VCR. Very cool - just works. I'm pretty sure Sky+ can't do that.

Bad News: Jumpy Luther - this week, we recorded LUTHER in HD. The recording was choppy. There were times when it froze for a second, and then continued - so it jumped, and crucial pieces of dialogue were lost. It persisted. The recording became unwatchable. :( Very disappointing. We opted for the 221 solution - BBC iPlayer in HD saved the day! :) This was absolutely perfect - just like watching it live - very impressed. I don't know why the recording went jumpy as it did - I don't think we were downloading or streaming anything in particular at the time - but we will have to keep an eye on this.

Performance

The graph says it all. Virgin Media is faster than Sky - end of.
Graph and measurement by James - thank you! :)

Life with Virgin Media - Week 1

Well - here we are after a week in the Wonderful World of Virginmedia. There are one or two happenings to report

SSL - I was briefly "tripped up" by the router. By default, SSL is blocked by the router. A small Gotcha.

Voicemail - I tried calling home whilst someone was on the phone over the weekend, and I got a voicemail service I didn't know I had! I'm going to have to explore this - see how it works. I'm not usually keen on these services, because often they don't have good ways of telling you that you've got a message. I disabled the Sky one.

Phone Number - I think VirginMedia have taken away my ex-directory number - I noticed that when I got a call from home here in the office, my number came up on the display instead of "UNKNOWN NUMBER". I think I'll let this go for the time being and see how it goes.

Router - I initially thought this was a crappy little black box, but after having explored its web interface and seen what you can do with it, I'm quite impressed. Connecting to it remotely seems very flaky - only works about one time in four - but that may be because of the SSL thing - I think I was trying remote access before I fixed the SSL thing.

Remote Control - a minor irritation for me on Sky was that the Sky+ remote control didn't seem to want to control the volume on my bog-standard Sony TV. The V+HD remote control lets me control volume, mute and power standby on my TV - happy about that! :)

Internet Performance - speed of Internet access is still consistently fast - I will put a graph up soon to prove this. One interesting thing, though - upload speed is crap compared to Sky. Since I only upload the odd small file by FTP to my own webspace, this isn't a problem. If you were some sort of massive upload junkie, I guess this might be a problem.

HD - we're starting to watch things in HD - and it's great - really good. Remember I said that most of what we end up watching tends to be on BBC and ITV? Well, most of it seems to be on BBC-HD and ITV1-HD!! We are becoming MainlyHD viewers! So we're not only getting the most benefit out of our TV, but also our ViriginMedia package. I need to do something about sound at some point soon - but I'm going to wait for the first broad release of HDMI 1.4 AV receivers first - hopefully later this year.

Tech Refresh - If you're interested, going VirginMedia is part of a slightly wider Tech Refresh. The plan is to reduce complexity, reduce devices and cabling - and improve functionality. So ditching the Sky+ box, redeploying the VCR/DVD-Recorder combi, and ditching the CD-Player in favour of a Bluray Player has made a huge difference. The house is now nearly a SCART-Free Zone. If acceptance testing of the Bluray Player continues to a successful conclusion, then I'll also ditch the XBMC. I'm hesitant about that step - there'll be LOTS of testing! I've now sorted out and tidied the cabling behind the TV, and it's a lot better now. I've got three things that are on 24x7 - always plugged in - and six things that are only powered up when necessary. So I'm saving as much electricity as possible and very few red lights or clocks. If I do go down the AV Receiver/5.1 route, I guess more headaches to come in that area!

Since I'm drifting off-topic, I'll stop there. Next time - graphs!

What Happened Next - First Use

The following events took place between 8pm and 10pm on Tuesday 27th April 2010...


The Internet access is FAST - that's now a given, so I'm not going to dwell on that any further. We will continue to take snapshot measurements, and in about a week, I'll objectively qualify "fast" for you. Key points being that it "feels" faster, and the kids are happy.

The V+HD box is a bit different. We've become so used to how the Sky+ box works - the menus and buttons - and now we start again. It feels a bit clunky and laborious - feels like you have to go through more sub-menus in order to get to the key things you want. I'm sure this perception will change with prolonged use, and it'll soon become second nature.

First off, we set a couple of things to record - one-time election programmes. That was easy - the record button is a toggle - so you highlight the programme, press RECORD once and the programme goes red, press it again and it cancels the recording and goes back to white. Easy. Next, we did our Series Links. It's better and worse than Sky+. It's better because it will apparently let you pick odd and possibly non-sequential episodes of a particular show to schedule to record. I can't immediately think of why we'd want to do that, but never mind. It's worse because it doesn't seem as "smart". When you look at, say, Ashes to Ashes on Sky+ programme guide, it says "5 of 8" or something like that. On V+HD, it just describes it as being "ongoing", which is less-helpful. Also, you can programme Sky+ to record remotely from any web-browser anywhere on the planet - not sure you can do that with V+HD - need to check that.

We found a programme coming up next week that sounds a bit mad and worth watching purely out of morbid curiosity. It's called something like "Scream if you know the answer" and they put "celebrities" on a rollercoaster and make them answer trivia questions whilst screaming. I think that's about it. We tried to V+ that. Because we watch so little TV, we opted for the basic Virgin channel package. This "scream" thing is on a channel I've never heard of, and we've never viewed, called Watch. Watch isn't part of our Virgin package. So we Sky+ it. It is part of the basic Sky package. It's just typical that this should happen last night, and be our first experience of our shiny new VirginMedia package. If we didn't still have the Sky+, I guess the outcome would have been "TOUGH!". Or upgrade - ain't gonna happen! Have we done the right thing moving away from Sky? I come back to the basic point that 95% of what we watch is on BBC1/2 and ITV/Channel4. Another 4.5% is Sky1. The other 0.5% is random and unpredictable and probably doesn't matter - if we don't have something, we won't care.

We'd been Sky+ing a short true-life drama series called "Five Daughters". So parts 1 and 2 were on the Sky+ box. Last night, we decided to try watching Part 1 on BBC iPlayer. I navigated to it relatively quickly and easily, and we started watching it. We got as far as the opening sequence, and then something child/school-related happened and we put it on pause. We didn't end up getting back to it for some time - maybe half an hour. By that time, a message came up asking us if we wanted to quit. Said no - play it. A pause - then - error message. Log a call, quote code xxx. Maybe the connection timed out. Came right out of the iPlayer menu system and back to regular TV. Did the same all over again - same error. Time getting on, very tired - just want to watch it. Sky+ to the rescue again - we watched what we Sky+ed. What would we do in that situation if we didn't have Sky+? This is a taste of things to come? Is iPlayer a bit flaky?

In any domestic situation like this, you want stuff to "just work". No messing about. Nothing technical or having to put the "troubleshooting" hat on. If your domestic appliances don't deliver against that kind of SLA, then they are very rapidly outed, and better alternatives are found. In this regard, the V+HD box is off to a pretty poor start. We couldn't watch a random one-time programme we wanted to watch, and iPlayer errored out. We have yet to experience HD - there's something come up on BBC HD that we're going to watch over the weekend - we'll see how that goes.

I asked the engineer about the Ethernet and USB ports on the shiny new Samsung V+HD box. He confirmed what I'd already learnt from forum posts. USB is only useful to charge things. Ethernet is for "future use". Sheesh. My shiny new LV bluray player has Ethernet too (wired and wireless) - it plays YouTube videos in HD and connects to "plus" content online. That's for present use - come on Virigin - get with the programme!

So with "Five Daughters" watched, I think the Sky+ box is empty now. I wanted to decommission it this evening, but now I can't because of that "Scream" progamme. Again - we're not quite there yet, but the end is in sight.

Oh yeah - telephone works fine. We all just assume that, don't we? Dial-tone service and all that.

What Happened Next - Restoring Normality

The following events took place between 6pm and 8pm on Tuesday 27th April 2010...
I played around for a while longer trying to get the cable modem to do sensible things on my home network. Didn't get anywhere, except the feeling of having failed. I was hoping I'd be able to leave the wireless aspect of the network as it was - just connect the cable modem to my network and leave the Netgear DG834 up, but with the ADSL modem part switched off (which I'm not now sure you can do anyway!).

So I concede defeat on this, and get the DLink DIR-615 out of its box. The cable modem is a little black box with green lights on it. So is this. The Quick Installation Guide is crap - it doesn't describe how to connect the cables, but fortunately, it's obvious. There's an Ethernet socket with "Internet" written above it, and some others. I connect the cable from the modem to "Internet", and the laptop to one of the others. I go in to the admin UI and get busy. All relatively straight-forward, and it works fine. Without going in to detail, I did have to completely alter the way the wireless network is set up, which was annoying. It's just that the Netgear has possibilities that the DLink doesn't. On the plus side, the DLink is "N", but I'm not sure we have any "N" devices. The DLink requires yet another power socket, so we now have no CD player.

I don't want to labour the point much further - but just to summarise - a VirginMedia installation requires THREE power sockets (V+HD, cable modem, router). We also had our power sockets arranged in such a way that only one thing needed to be switched on 24x7, so we were using the least electricity possible - that's gone out the window now and will need a re-think.

With the DLink up, the kids are back in business. I start reconfiguring wireless devices. Not a big deal. The printer was connected to a server on the Netgear in the study. Netgear is now out. Jury remains out over exactly how to connect the printer. The kids use it for homework, but it'd be nice to be able to print from the laptop over wireless. That needs some thought. In the immediate-term, I took the print server down, I took the Netgear down. I moved the printer so it's mid-way between the kids two computers, and they now have a USB cable connection to share. Installed printer/scanner software on the kids computers. So on the plus side, they can now scan stuff. I'm not happy with the printer where it is - it's essentially on top of a wall unit, and you can't see the lights/buttons on the control panel. May get a longer USB cable and put the printer back where it was, or look at a dedicated print server and put it back on the network.

There is now a large number of annoyingly-flashing green lights under the TV. I start tidying up and thinking about arranging things. The DLink is now hidden - quite literally in the very back corner of the room. The cable modem - which flashes the most - is in full view under the TV. I'll need to re-route all its cables in order to move it. This is a job for later. It's not that I'm putting it off as such - it's just that the Blu-ray player arrives today, and I'll move the modem as part of re-cabling to install the player.

Eventually - in a week or so - things WILL be better. There will be less devices, less need for power sockets, less complexity and less things on 24x7. We're just not quite there yet.

So I got there. Everything is up. Everyone is happy. The Internet is faster. It took longer than I anticipated - which these things generally do. When I bought this service, I went with all the default options - I didn't opt in or out of anything. This means that I got the same install experience as anyone else would get. You have to pay extra to have your Internet fully set up and your wireless etc. I'm a little bit technical - I know a bit about TCP/IP and networking - at least I understood that my modem was pushing out Class A when everything else was talking Class B. I wonder at what experience people who know less about computers and networking than me have...

Later, I'll post on what happened between 8 and 10 - our first-use experience.

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. :(

Virgin Media "24"

The following events took place between 4pm and 5pm on Tuesday 27th April 2010...
The cabling is all up - the SAMSUNG (yay!!) V+ box is installed and showing a diagnostic screen. There's also a Cisco cable modem, and there will be a router, and he's got to wire in a phone socket for the phone line. I get the feeling things are taking longer than he'd expect or like. I'm a little concerned about mains sockets - or the lack of them. We did just have the Sky+ box, and now we've still got the Sky+ box (for now), but we're getting three new things in that corner, and there's only one mains socket - hmm - we'll see.

In terms of injecting a bit of drama - there's now a Race Against Time! I'm supposed to be going on a training course this evening. I need to leave here, having eaten dinner, at 7pm. Virgin Media dude is not going to set up the wireless or networking aspect of things - he'll just get as far as being able to connect his laptop to the Internet over a cable connection. So it might be that I need to set up our wireless and home network stuff later.

Virgin Media "24"

The following events took place between 3pm and 4pm on Tuesday 27th April 2010...



VirginMedia dude arrived at 15:25.
He completed a site survey, and we played "hunt the gray box". We found it on the side of the garage. This is the old Cabletel box from Way Back When. The deal is that Virgin have fibre to their box at the bottom of the street, and then copper coaxial cable from the box to the door. Ironically, it's only relatively recently that we took down the Cabletel cabling - when we had the double-glazing done. Now it's being put back up again - but all shiny and new for 2010.
 
Dude has had two glasses of chilled water and reckons that in buying 10mbit broadband from VirginMedia, we should get 9mbit no problem. If he's right, then that will be 2-3 times faster than my 20mbit service from Sky over copper from the BT exchange. We'll see...

Virgin Media "24"

The following events took place between 2pm and 3pm on Tuesday 27th April 2010...



Some tumbleweed blew across the sitting room. No-one arrived - no-one did anything.

Virgin Media "24"

The following events took place between 1pm and 2pm on Tuesday 27th April 2010...
Nothing. No-one arrived - no-one did anything.

Monday 26th April 2010

The following events took place on Monday 26th April 2010...


Today, Liz called from VirginMedia. It was a Courtesy Call - she said so. She was - courtious. She confirmed that an engineer would be coming to see me at home between 1pm and 6pm tomorrow. She asked if I would be there - I said I wouldn't miss it for the world. Oh - the excitement is building...

Thursday 22nd April 2010

The following events took place on Thursday 22nd April 2010...
Today I had a letter from VirginMedia. It begins "Dear Sky Customer..." It's offering me a great deal involving a free V+HD box and free installation if I take out the XL TV Package. There is a handy pre-completed "Sky subscription-cancelling" letter. Been there, done that. Plus a book of 11 reasons to say goodbye to Sky. The book doesn't mention that the help desk is delivered out of India instead of Scotland. The book shows the Samsung V+HD box and no little caption to say you might get anything different.

Here in the 21st century, we have this wonderful invention called CRM SOFTWARE. It automagically ensures that you target the right people with your marketing, that you don't waste your marketing dollars, and you don't piss off people who are existing, pending or recently-deceased/departed customers. It also makes you appear "smart" (even if you're not). VirginMedia favour the Carpet-bombing School of Marketing. Gotta love intelligent organisations! ;)