Re: UKNM: Re: More whingeing about Telewest/Surfunlimited

[Peter Drury]

i have surf unlimited from cable london. it took me nigh on 3 months of

weekly phone calls before they cracked.

finally i received

- a letter from telewest welcoming me to blueyonder (to what? from whom?

i'm a cable london customer)

- an installer cd from "cable internet" with no mention of blueyonder /

telewest / cable london

cracking product management, natch.


naturally the installer was way way out of date (still using 0171 tel

numbers, with the wrong DNS settings, installing ie4 over the top of ie5,

bespoke dial up application, all the usual stuff. over a year out of date,

at a guess). i had to reformat that particular partition on my mac to

recover from the mess it made.


luckily i was able to dig deep deep into the support pages on

www.blueyonder.co.uk to get the settings i needed to connect manually. but

then i'm hardly a mass market consumer.


BUT i still only get connected properly 50% of the time, and the network is

a shocker (no www caching, FFS).


I've gone back to demon and the 70UKP per month phone bills. that bad.


512k is fine over cable modem BTW - as a www user you won't notice much

difference over cable modem between 512k and 1.5Mb - after a point it's

less about raw bandwidth and much more about minimising network latency and

maximising the efficieny of the caches at the edge of the network -

remember that the internet as a whole is not broadband. getting the pipe

into your house is the easy bit - running a backbone network that can scale

to support hundreds of thousands of heavy use broadband users is the hard

bit, as BT et al will  discover i fear.


(i had use of a chello cable modem connection in brussels, and it changed

my life)


>OK, I promise this is the last mention I'll make of Telewest/Cable London,

>but...

>

>To recap: I received a letter on 24th June saying that I'd finally got to

>the front of the queue and would receive my Surfunlimited CD-ROM within "a

>few days". No CD so far. But they have been taking the money from me for it

>since 13th June.

>

>Today I phoned them only to be told that this was all a mistake and I am

>still in the backlog.  OK, so I have now been in the backlog for THREE

>MONTHS.

>

>My question is: anyone else here got Surfunlimited - apart from Sam who I

>know about - and how long did you have to wait?

>

>Now I'm off to compose my letters to the Guardian Consumer and Watchdog.

>

>----- Original Message -----

>

From: <Speechradaol [dot] com>

>

To: <uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com>

>Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 6:33 PM

>Subject: Re: UKNM: Corporates on the Web

>

>

>> In a message dated 10/07/00 17:47:11 GMT Daylight Time,

>

> mteasdalethinkinc [dot] co [dot] uk writes:

>>

>> << Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but moaning about Telewest is just

>> about

>>  my favourite subject right now.  >>

>> Hmm, interesting, they are currently cabling 'bits of' Worcestershire,

>I'll

>> avoid them.  Thanks.   The price of �150 installation and �50 per month

>for

>> 512k max didn't seem too good either.

>>

>>

>> Michael Trott

>> Operations Director

>> Speechradio.com Ltd. - The Internet's Leading Audio Content Provider



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