virginmedia....

I moved this last weekend from Holland Park (London - W11) to Belsize Park (London - NW3), and asked virginmedia to move my cable box and cable modem. The original order was indicated no problem as both sides were wired.

Woke up to no service in the old flat, expected, no big deal. Disconnected everything and brought it to the new house. Connected it, no go. Called and was told needed new gear - I protested as (a) pain in the arse for me; (b) costs them money. In truth don't care about (b) personally but care a lot about (a).

Knew that the electronics were the same but they simply would not listen to me. Went out and picked up a 3-3G USB dongle for email access for the few days..

Gave virgin my work address to send the gear to but of course when I got home on Monday and Tuesday had the UPS slip there saying they tried to deliver. ARGHGHGHGHGHG. Called Wednesday am and confirmed they had 3 boxes for me. Re-routed to the UPS depo, which is thankfully only 10 minutes away.

Get to the UPS station, pick up the 3 boxes:
Box 1: cables
Box 2: another set of cables, exact same as 1
Box 3: cables (same as 1&2), wireless router, cable modem and cable box

So 3 sets of cables which I didn't need as I had from the old house. A cable modem and cable box that were IDENTICAL to what I had. I then had to call them to GIVE THEM the serial numbers/mac addresses of the units. I'm sure if I had used the old ones they would have worked.

I really don't understand as I've now got an extra cable modem, cable tv box, wireless router and 4 sets of wires - AND - it took me 5 extra days to get up and running...

Waste of my time and their money. Did I say I don't understand? They really wasted their £££s on this one

Saving Money

I've followed the lead of Jaime in regards to money monthly. Recently the cable/phone/internet access as our weekend place went from the 12 month rate of ~120/mo to ~170/mo. Given we do not use this daily this was over the top.

Dropped internet from the cable company and am replacing with a DSL line from AT&T: saving $25/mo. Yes, it's 5Mb -> 768Kb but as I mentioned we do not use this often.

Dropped the all you can eat phone from the cable company and replace with a bare-bones dial up line: saving $22/mo. Yes, back to per minute charges but we just *don't* use this line much. I tried gizmo5 with an older cisco voip box but that does not work with fax lines unfortunately. Perhaps I'll setup a line-2 on our phones for outgoing.

Dropped the advanced cable with the box to basic cable. Dropping another ~$25/mo. Given we don't watch too much TV. I'd switch to over the air, but we really are remote and not much will show up.

And to top it off I don't have to deal as much with the cable company customer support - that alone is worth it. AT&T can't suck as much as this particular cable company support.

Course as luck would have it, I tried to save money last month with them and they offered to go from $170 -> $150/mo which was still too much. Explained that was not enough given our weekend usage and that I would absolutely be dropping. Told there was not anything they could do for me. When I called to drop the phone/internet services was told they could get me to a 12/month $99/mo deal - course too little/too late

Bit of a pita, but saving ~$80/mo or so for is worth it