Virgin to Sky!

For various reasons, mainly increasing in price I decided that I was leaving Virgin Media and joining Sky for TV, Broadband and TV. I am now, eventually, on Sky and this is the Saga!!

Leaving Virgin was not easy to say the least. The first telephone call ended with me completely losing my rag, and slamming the phone down. The issue being that the person at the other end of the phone kept trying to persuade me to stay, questioning the details of my new package with Sky and refusing to listen to what I was saying (I probably wasn’t listening to him either). The second call went much better and I thought that we had agreed a disconnection date; but the next day I received a letter (printed not email), detailing my new revised contract with Virgin. On the third call we did agree a disconnection date (a couple of days after the sky installation date, just to be safe).

 

What I hadn’t appreciated is that there are really only two main providers of broadband and telephone infrastructure. Virgin Media who have an all-fibre infrastructure and currently do not let other companies use it or sell it. The other is BT/Openreach who use a mixture of fibre and copper and do let third parties, including Sky, sell it.

Install day came. The TV dish etc were installed ok and work perfectly. As always there are differences in how things work but we now, more or less get easily get what we want. My main gripe is that being red/green colour blind I cannot tell whether the Sky box is on or off.

 

The broadband/phone is another story. The first installer was a subcontractor to Openreach who said that for various reasons he needed a cherry picker to get to the top of the nearby telegraph pole and then left.  Eventually on the 20 April (install date was meant to be 3 April) a crew that included cherry picker, mobile hoist on the back of a truck plus engineer arrived and everything was installed and now works ok. My main complaint, and I have raised this as an official complaint is that I ended up managing it all including asking Virgin to keep my service active for another few weeks. If Sky sell it then they should have been on top of the process. The Sky help desk team have been very helpful, but my non-installation should have been picked up and someone should have been contacting me, not me doing the chasing.

 

Broadband so far has been reliable, albeit much slower, around 35 mb/sec compared to 200 plus that I was getting. As I am not a gamer or run a home business what I get is quite fast enough for me and the household. That is one thing that Virgin do not understand; that for oldies like me superfast speeds are not needed. If we had five or so heavy active users than maybe 200 plus is required. Putting my prices up by around £40 per month, then offering 500mb/sec by way of compensation is not for me.

 

Now the pains of leaving Virgin and getting the new system installed are behind me I am reasonably happy. I am due to get some money back from Sky/Openreach due to the delays. I will report back on how easy this process is!!

Rugby - a once great game slowly fading away

I think that one aspect that many forget is that rugby was never designed to be a spectator sport. I know that we cannot go back to the "good old days". But when my dad was taking me to Twickenham back in the fifties the vast majority of the crowd were either players, former players plus some wives or girl friends and children. The vast majority knew and understood the laws of the game and were appreciative of the finer points and the "dark arts". This was also true of the brave few who stood on the touchline at their local ground on a Saturday.

I would suggest that the majority of the crowds today have never played or not played since school. Do not understand the laws (not sure if I do anymore) and just want a spectacle with lots of "hits" and some occasional deft ball handling. The administrators see ££notes rather than wanting to see people playing the game no matter how ineptly My own playing was not that spectacular to say the least, but I loved it.

What I would love to see from the RFU is a clear concise statement of their vision for the game at all levels. I am also waiting for the pink pigs to come flying past my window.

The slow ending of Amateur Rugby?

 For sometime now it has been my belief that the Rugby Football Union wants to do away with amateur rugby. That it would like to move to the American Football model of the game just being played at school, college(university) and then a relatively small number of professional clubs.

I doubt if they will do it overnight, but this article in the Guardian suggests that they are moving along that track.

Click here to read the article