Other What currently makes your life awesome?

Spent hours at the weekend wiring a “proper” ethernet cable run to upstairs. It goes from a patch box downstairs out through an existing hole in the gable end wall, up the side of the house, round the back wall, into another existing hole, and through an internal wall to a patch box. Plugged a cable in at both ends, and… nothing. Zip. Nada. Linky no worky. Immediately annoyed that hours of sweaty and awkward work have led to nothing, start berating myself for thinking that one of my brilliant ideas would ever work, go back to the old crappy internal cable.

Wind on to today and I have an ethernet cable tester; one of those simple connectivity test jobbies, that lights up each pin in sequence if they’re electrically connected. Ok cool, all my cables are fine, they’re not the problem. Fine, plug in two working cables at either end of my new cable run… and all except two of the eight lights blink, pins 2&6 stay resolutely unblinking. Ok, well that’s not as terrible as I thought, that should be easily salvageable - just pop open the pattress (Edit: yes you stupid phone, pattress is bloody well right, stop changing it) boxes and check my keystone jacks are properly connected, easy.

But that’s not really the “awesome” part, because… big whoop, I wired an ethernet cable run, someone call The Guardian and tell them they’ve found their page 1 headline… No, the awesome part is that: the cable in question is CAT6, meaning it can support 10GbE over short runs, and the NIC in my router is now a 100/1000/10000 multi-gig NIC.

All this means that I can finally tell Virgin Media to absolutely go and get in the ****ing sea by taking a long walk off a short ****ing pier.

YouFibre and a plethora of other fibre-slingers are finally in my area, and I can get a much better deal with them than I can with Virgin ****ing Media. They all offer similar or faster speeds for a lower price, but obviously there’s no point going to 2Gbit internet when my network can only handle 1Gbit.

I have lived in Cardiff for 17 years, and for 17 ****ing years I have had to deal with Virgin ****ing Media’s anticompetitive ********. Constant price increases, paying more than new customers, no loyalty offers, paying more for less, shitty equipment, shitty service, shitty attitude… I’ve had no other option unless I wanted to take a big step back and drop to 40-50Mbit ADSL; compared to the gigabit I’ve had for a decade, 40-50mbit is like stepping back into the dialup era, and it wasn’t even that much cheaper than VM.

Well not any ****ing more.

I pay that bunch of greedy shits £72.50 a month for 1Gbit down & 100Mbit up, and I’m currently out of contract. If I want it cheaper I have to go back on an 18-24 month contract.

YouFibre are offering 2Gbit synchronous with a fixed IPv4 address (which I’ll need for self-hosting, since YouFibre use CGNAT which is a whole host of headaches) for £69.99 per month. “Hey, that’s not much cheaper” - no, you’re right, it isn’t much cheaper. But it’s 2x the download speed, 20x the upload speed, has a fixed IP, it’s a rolling month-by-month contract, and it’s still ****ing cheaper than Virgin ****ing Media.

Or I could do an 18-month contract with YouFibre at 2Gbit synchronous with static IP add-on for £54.99 per month.

Or I could go for my previous front-runner, Zen Broadband. £50 per month for 910Mbit down/110Mbit up, 18 month contract, a fixed IP as standard, and a very highly-regarded support service.

In case it wasn’t clear, I do not like Virgin Media.

I really really really do not like Virgin Media.

 

That reminds me I need to tell Sky to Jog on and find a new provider

 

We switched to Freesat, nearly 3 years ago. We've not regretted it.

 

The worst bit about Virgin is the battle for a good price at the end of contract, otherwise it is decent, no one offers the value of Virgin for me unless I want to be a pirate. I have the fully monty, 59/mnth until Nov at least when it becomes £240ish. I've never really paid more than £80 though for this deal, lets hope I can win retentions lucky dip again this year I hear it is getting harder.

I would have had Youfibre as its in my area but zero TV services and there is no value to me for a faster upload, a faster download I could use, but as I top out at 1.6Gb on Wi-Fi on the devices I do big downloads on as they are mobile/handheld PCs that don't have Wifi7 yet I couldn't really use more.

If youfibre do a deal with Sky as has been rumoured I may well do the switch.

 

The best thing I ever did to improve Virgin Media was to put their e-waste "superhub" in modem-only mode and build my own router. From what I gather, that's not really possible on a lot of their newer hardware, so I think that's going to entirely rule out using Virgin Media ever again, no matter what kind of deal they offer.

The only hardware YouFibre need me to have is the ONT box, if you want to use your own hardware they DGAF:

I've had that fight more times than I can count in the last 17 years, I am quite sick of it.

We had a TV, landline, and broadband package through VM about 5-6 years ago - it was cheaper to get the whole lot rather than paying for services individually, so why the hell not. The landline never had a phone plugged in, not even once. We watched a little bit of 'live' TV here and there... but soon went back to streaming, and left VM's TV box gathering dust.

A TV service has absolutely no value to me whatsoever, and I begrudge the fact that I have to pay VM more if I want only internet and no other services.

 

After 9 months of essentially getting paid to sit on my fat ass listening to boring idiots waffle away on a Teams call waiting for my security clearance I have *finally* been transferred to a different team so I can actually do some work and feel like I'm making a contribution! Even better, the only properly decent manager on the floor will now be my manager! Huzzah!

 

Yep, this is the only way. The VM hubs are absolutely abysmal as routers - I reckon 99% of the complaints about VM WiFi being crap are entirely due to their hubs being shite. Modem only + your own router is the only sensible option.

We are almost certainly going to switch from VM to Zen at some point this year. Pretty sure that Zen also don't do mid-contract price increases which is nice.

I've just had a look and aye, that's right, no mid-contract increases. Although Zen are offering me "Full Fibre 900" which is 910 down, 910 up on an 18-month deal for £40 a month which seems to be a better deal than they're offering you - I'm not in Cardiff, but it seems weird that they offer different pricing in different parts of the country?

 

The Hub 5 is not bad just lacks some of the multiple SSID stuff if you want to do segmentation, will do the full 1.2Gb over WIFI, its range is not the best but the do give free discs for coverage, its fine, I measured no real difference between my own routers whether custom guy through my NAS or my Wifi7 stuff with 10Gb interfaces and good processors though I only have 40 odd devices on it.

VM are giving everyone the latest one now and it is worth having, even giving them call to get it if you have Gig1 fibre as it is better.

 

I ditched them about a year ago now, I think? Their hub was useless, poor signal and fell over daily during coronamageddon, presumably not being able to handle many things connected to it. Opting to put it in modem only and using TPLink's comparatively excellent kit, it at least worked as expected. The pricing battles wore me down, so I opted for a 5g external router (ZTE MC7010) with a Smarty data only sim for £18/month and have had no issues at all. Ping averages about 21ms, download around 260, upload around 70. I've seen it go up to 1.2gb, not very often but it's nice when it does, as I'm right on the fringe of full 5G.

 

Last time VM sent me a new hub, they also sent me a power adaptor that... didn't fit the hub. Fortunately I had a suitable adaptor lying around but a bit of googling shows that this is not an isolated incident. If they can't even send out the right power pack then I have very little hope that they can do anything else properly

 

Security clearance you say? That's a lot of time being patient , are we allowed to know who you're working for?

 

Yup, these things can take a while. I am currently working on a project that has needed some Government clearance, clearance from the company that i am doing the job for, plus a couple of other ..... bits. The first two parts came through pretty quickly, but i am still waiting on other bits. Thankfully i can make a great start on the job without those bits, but they will be very much needed if i have to visit the site, endless fun and games.

 

Pfft, who hasn't had to sign the Official Secrets Act at one time or another?

 

Who's to say? Shhhhh....

 

Finally managed to get Crossover to work properly on my Mac after initially hitting a brick wall. One of those scenarios where you try everything and nothing works.... right up until it just does and you are left scratching your head.

Either way it turns out that Hogwarts and Control are actually quite playable at a mixture of medium settings and with a little bit of scaling help. Overall image is a little soft but other than that it looks fine given the settings.

One major advantage is that despite the game running locally I could only hear its fans if I turned off all audio and put my ear right to the keyboard.

Really only an experiment as I just wanted to see how it would run but cool nonetheless.

 

Signed up for a 10k this morning.

I don’t run ever, like ever. Also breakfast this morning consisted of donuts and chocolates left over from last night because yesterday was such a crap day I just wanted to watch movies and pig out.

 

It’s easy to keep secrets, when I can’t remember what they are…

 

Oh man, that’s a good one, thanks for that ‘cos I needed a laugh this morning

I’ve had the same hub since I went to gigabit, and that was at least 6-7 years ago. A couple of years back I called them and asked about getting an upgraded version; I was basically told to piss off because I don't need it. I didn't even have the option of paying them money for it.

Besides, from what I've read the newer kit doesn't have modem-only mode and that's a deal-breaker now.

 

Only the people on actual fibre XGSPON can't do modem only that's the Hub5x, on the old RFoG you get the Hub5, I have the 5 in modem mode as I have my own infrastructure, along with better wifi gives you a 2.5Gb port too so you can get the full 1.2Gb of VM gig1 on to your own stuff rather than just 1G.

I think it's a recent change in policy, just told my brother in law to do the same as he could not get more than 700Mb on wifi for obvious reasons as old hub is Wifi5 without 160Mhz channels, he didn't actually understand that Wifi was his problem, they have nothing wired and was complaining VM were rubbish etc, showed him my Wifi speed told him what his issue actually is and he has a new hub on the way.

 

Doesn't matter what model it is, they wouldn’t even let me buy a new model a few years back.

Point is, I’ve had no choice but to be on VM until relatively recently. Every time I’ve called to have the “I want a better price” argument, I really haven’t had any other alternative; it’s not like I’m going to go from 1 gigabit down to ~40-50Mbit, so it’s always an empty threat. Now when I call them however, if I say “YouFibre can do 2x the download, 20x upload, a static IPv4 address, let me use my own hardware, and have a 1-month rolling contract for £69.99 - match that or I walk” it’s no longer an empty threat.