[IP] more on : Strung Up With Cable TV
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 11:08:29 +0000
From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on : Strung Up With Cable TV
X-Sender: nbr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Hi Dave:
you can also subscribe to just the cable and phone line for
£13.50/month (its priced so you have to get a phone line). that's
generally equivalent to $40 for broadband and $25 for tv, in terms of
equivalent UK spending power, despite being 1.9 dollars to the pound
right now. i should point out that the telewest organization is a
complete disaster (read: nightmare) in terms of ordering, provisioning,
customer service, billing, response to repair problems, and use of the
internet to accomplish all of the above -- but this
is all typical here.
I beg to differ. I may just be lucky (not just in not living in London or
the South of England! :-) but my experiences with Telewest Broadband here
in Newcastle have been excellent so far. I've had it nearly two years, the
installation of the line from under the pavement (sidewalk) to our house
was done very competently, as was the setting up of my iMac. The engineer
who did all this really knew his stuff.
Some months later when I wanted to connect via Airport, that was something
their service people, whom I contacted by email, couldn't help me with. But
I found just the right information in an article on the Applecare web site,
and used the Telewest web-site without difficulty to make the necessary
reconfiguration. (I then contributed a note on using Airport to the
Telewest web-site, as a result of which a number of Apple users of Telewest
have since contacted me - somewhat unnecessarily - for further details,)
Since subscribing to Telewest I've had connection problems on just three
occasions. Two were solved simply by resetting the modem, just one was I
think due to a temporary problem at the Telewest end. I've had no problems
with billing, either, touch wood.
In contrast, Sky, via whom we get our TV (by satellite), are really a
complete disaster regarding billing, etc., even thugh they are in much
better financial shape than Telewest. I made the mistake of being a very
early adopter of Sky+, a TiVo-like service they provide. It became
painfully clear that though their technical staff were fine, their sales
and billing systems were badly broken.
Cheers
Brian
--
School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
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