Telewest (Blueyonder)

...Media, whether we were with Telewest OR NTL.

This is my third and hopefully last opinion on an ISP unless I move to an area without cable TV. I'm also mindful of the merger between Telewest and NTL; the latter not having, shall we say, a spotless reputation for customer service.

Note: Some of the prices quoted are higher than those offered today, but firms weren't falling over each other four years ago.

...
...noticed:-

f) TELEWEST BLUEYONDER BROADBAND, i.e. £13.49/month for the first 3 months, reverting to £30 afterwards. Of course, this would push my entire telecomm/internet budget up to £64/month, but broadband was a whole new kettle of fish, and hopefully not a can of worms to boot.

INSTALLATION

Off to the www.Telewest.co.uk site I went (Now www.blueyonder.co.uk). Firstly, you have to establish whether they ... more

UPDATED to take account of 4 years' experience as at October 2006. From February 2007, we're all now called Virgin Media, whether we were with Telewest OR NTL.

This is my third and hopefully last opinion on an ISP unless I move to an area without cable TV. I'm also mindful of the merger between Telewest and NTL; the latter not having, shall we say, a spotless reputation for customer service.

Note: Some of the prices quoted are higher than those offered today, but firms weren't falling over each other four years ago.

So far, I've used (and written about): -

a) COMPUSERVE back in the days when you got three hours use a month for US $9.95 AND BT's charges for the phone calls! Having got wise to this, I cut over to…

b) FREESERVE'S BASIC PAY AS YOU GO SERVICE, which meant I only paid for the phone calls, the cost of which could be monitored by nominating the dial-up number as my "Best Friend" - I ask you, just how sad is that? A computer as your best friend! Once I'd established my usage pattern, I changed to…

c) FREESERVE'S OFF-PEAK HOMETIME, which was great for a while, since, as a pioneering customer, I was only being charged the BT part of the tariff, i.e. £5/month. Then, they got wise to this and upped this to £10 or so, if I remember correctly. This got me thinking about 24-hour access, and with a bit of looking around, I came upon……

d) FREE24/7.NET who only wanted the princely sum of £7.99/month for 24/7 access, although not admittedly an "always on" connection by any means. After the honeymoon period was over, the hit rate on getting through after even 3 or 4 attempts was abysmal, and the whole thing began to feel like it wasn't even worth £7.99, and so I returned to…..

e) FREESERVE ANYTIME. Luckily, I'd kept my Freeserve account alive by retaining the Pay As You Go service during my sojourn to Free24/7.net, so apart from stumping up £13/month instead of £7.99, it was a fuss-free changeover. No sooner had my "free" month expired than the charges went up to £14/month. Great welcome back, guys! In hindsight, the prospect of paying £14/month for mere dial-up is laughable these days.

As the latter required me to have a BT line, my combined phone and Internet charges are around £50/month.Then, whilst reading a Sunday paper one fateful day I noticed:-

f) TELEWEST BLUEYONDER BROADBAND, i.e. £13.49/month for the first 3 months, reverting to £30 afterwards. Of course, this would push my entire telecomm/internet budget up to £64/month, but broadband was a whole new kettle of fish, and hopefully not a can of worms to boot.

INSTALLATION

Off to the www.Telewest.co.uk site I went (Now www.blueyonder.co.uk). Firstly, you have to establish whether they serve your postal area, and they have a code checker facility to prove this - I assume that if your area is covered by NTL instead, that they would have a similar facility.

Two screens later I was signed up, with a promise of an e-mail and a phone call back. Both happened as promised, and I have to give credit to the absolutely darling young lady on their Sales Team helpdesk - she was a little diamond, with a full working knowledge of the product, even the nitty-gritty technical questions I had listed before speaking to them.

The installation lead-time was only one week, so on Thursday 30th May the fitters arrived - one to upgrade my PC, and two to fit the cables. I had opted to let them fit the network card into my PC, since it only bumped up the installation price by a very reasonable £12.50 to £62.50, and then if they mess my PC up, it's their fault, not mine! In addition to the network card in the PC, they also supply an external cable modem for connection to their co-axial (like TV aerial) cable.

ADSL users may smirk at the concept of having to pay for installation, having no doubt been sent a USB-only modem through the post and a list of things to do to get connected, and this is the one major Achilles Heel of cable broadband; the lack of a 'bargain basement DIY' installation.

The lads out in the garden finally ran the cable to our combined satisfaction to my PC, located in the little bedroom over the front door. No sooner were the cables connected, than BINGO, I was on line. No log-in, nada, niente, rien, nowt.

FIRST USE

The first thing I did via my brand-spanking-new broadband connection was lie to Freeserve about going abroad, which kept my e-mail account with them alive for 90-days. This gave me plenty of time to get everyone using my Blueyonder account before Freeserve cut me off. It's pretty easy to get Outlook Express to pick up e-mail from another server - you just have to remember that the "POP3" incoming server remains as per Freeserve's own settings, but the "SMTP" outgoing server changes to smtp.blueyonder.co.uk.

(My apologies, if you don't know what I'm talking about, but suffice it to say that you can pick up other ISP's mail and even Hotmail, via Outlook Express.)

USING BROADBAND IN GENERAL

As I said before, the first main difference you notice immediately, is that there is no log-on process. It's almost as Telewest are your very own 'IT Department' in some remote branch of your own organisation.

For those used to 56K dial-up access, which, let's face it was NEVER going to be 56K unless you lived IN the telephone exchange, the transformation was quite astounding, even at the download speed of 512K, which at the time was their opening offer.

"Things" started to happen at almost a speed commensurate with their being on your own C:\drive, let alone on the Internet. For instance, the home page of a site like CIAO was taking 0.5 seconds to load. Of course, a slow site was STILL a slow site, but at least you'd removed one more (weak) link from the chain.

Anyone keen on lengthy mp3 music downloads will also appreciate broadband - some of the file sizes now possible would never have got loaded within a dial-up ISP's cut-off time. In fact, if you are connected to a fast source at the other end, you can listen to the music in real time without "running out" of downloaded file!

Playing a music CD through Windows Media Player results in the artist's name, album and track titles appearing within seconds as MP uses the web to catalogue discs on first use - possible with dial-up too, but always involving a time constraint.

It's was if the Internet was now part of my PC's own capacity, allowing me, for example, to check pricing details for this opinion whilst writing it, instead of "parking" issues until I got around to them. Suddenly, the Information Superhighway started to make sense. OK, I know my upload speed was limited to 128K at that point (over the years, this has improved to 512K - ironically my original DOWNLOAD speed), but this really only affected e-mail file attachments, and it was STILL umpteen times faster than via a phone modem.

Something else you notice is how many more phone calls you get since freeing-up your line. Of course, you may not view this as an advantage!

THAT WAS THEN - (0 to 10 megabytes in 126,144,000 seconds)

Almost a year to the day of taking on the basic 512K service at around £30/month, I actually splashed out the extra £10/month to be the first to upgrade to a 'sparkling' 1 megabyte connection.

Since then, over the years, Blueyonder have upgraded my connection AND lowered my tariff to the extent that I now pay £35/month (£30/month if included with other services from Telewest) for 10 (!) megabyte broadband, and therein lies the major advantage of cable broadband.

When they say they can give you 10 megabytes, they can. There's none of this 'speeds up to 8 megabytes' for £14.99/month. In my experience of setting up numerous friends' ADSL connections, this usually means less than 2 megabytes, or exactly 2 if you're lucky.

Like the old dial-up connections of yore, distance from the exchange and line quality matter. I suspect that anyone actually getting 8 megabytes from their entry level ADSL connection lives in the basement of the telephone exchange. Of course, with ADSL2 being rolled out, cable broadband mustn't rest on its laurels, and I'm betting that there are still extra speed hikes to come.

If I'm honest, I could easily cut back to Blueyonder's 4 megabyte tariff and save a bit of money - funny how they always offer you more for the same money. There's never an obvious route to a price cut whilst keeping what you've got, is there?

Equally, having 10 megabytes download speed still can't speed up a slow site, and it was disappointing on the day of the last upgrade from 4 to 10 'meg' that there was little noticeable difference. Of course, downloading large files for whatever reason IS faster, a lot faster, but I don't do much of it.

SERVICE LEVELS

Over the 4 years, I think my circuit has been down for about 5 working days spread over about 8 occasions. Only one of these faults was 'personal', i.e. requiring a visit, which was carried out promptly. Ominously, the engineer spent just as much time fixing it as he did talking to his mates about his redundancy package! Since corners have been cut and companies have merged, I've had little to complain about, so I await my next human contact with trepidation.

The first thing I do, when there's an 'outage', is check with their information line, which is a 0845 number, so it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to deal with. Initially this gives me general recorded information, but in this instance, it's actually useful and can save you hanging on. Being told that 'users in west London may be experiencing some difficulties with either internet or e-mail' IS quite reassuring - at least you know you won't have to wait in for an engineer.

If I want to visit their web-site, for a check on lead-times to fix this, I can use the 'roaming dial-up number' they've given me for lap-top use.

PROS & CONS

The initial set-up needs an engineering visit. Their modem does now include a USB connection as well as the more 'industrial' LAN connection; the latter being useful if you decide to network more than one PC. Even friends with ADSL have found out the hard way that networking PCs requires a network card to be installed in a hard-wired PC*, since that's what routers need to connect to, effectively sending their USB modem to the scrap heap. (You need a router to set up a shared home network)

*I'm not overly keen on the prospect of an 'all wi-fi' affair since breaking back into the router's menu is nigh on impossible, if something goes awry with the encrypted radio link from PC to router.

The speed they tell you you're going to get is actually what you end up with.

There's no monthly 'capping' of download capacity with Blueyonder broadband, and there never has been. They still don't like you to run a business server from home, as my neighbour found out when he decided to found a repro-furniture import-export business. Anyway, an upload speed of only 512K wouldn't be much use if you did. Although they reserve the right to change your IP address at will, they seldom do, especially if you never go away on holiday for more than 5 weeks, which was the only occasion it ever happened to me.

That leads me to another aspect. A fixed IP address has its critics. Sites that log your IP address for security reasons throw a wobbly if yours keeps changing, but a fixed IP address can be a temptation to hacking, since it gives hackers longer to break in. Obviously, a firewall is a major priority.

There's no option NOT to log on, which means that you are on-line 100% of the time your PC is running. For those few brief moments when you are installing security software, there's always the tiny chance that your PC will 'pick up' precisely what you're hoping to block out!

OK, you can press the 'pause' button on the modem, but unless it's within reach, it's not quick to do.

Home networking is not quite such a neat solution since you have to add a router to the existing modem, instead of buying one with a built-in replacement modem - yet one more box on the table.

As someone who still maintains his BT line, I'm less prone to losing all my 'telecoms' in one fell swoop. If my BT line goes down, let's say with a cable fault, I've still got Skype, and I can still e-mail BT to let them know. If my cable TV circuit breaks down, I've still got my phone line to harass Telewest!

As one of their 'Elite' customers, I'm entitled to a complete PC protection package, thereby saving me the recurring cost of keeping something like Norton or MacAfee up to date. PCGuard covers anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, pop-up blocking, anti-phishing filtering, ID protection and, if you want it, parental control.

My only major niggle is their inability to resolve an ongoing problem I have with e-mail. I'm constantly getting 'Undeliverable' messages from distant e-mail servers, for messages I haven't even sent, usually to Kiev University. I can only assume that some Ukrainian bastard is 'spoofing' my e-mail to shower them in spam. Blueyonder have been no use at all in resolving this one, but then, since it's not actually me doing it, maybe they really are powerless. An acknowledgement would have been nice though guys.

CONCLUSION

Expensive if all you want is some kind of broadband.

Worth it if you value service, speed and reliability

Having now 'helped' several friends get their TalkTalk connection working (occasionally), I can only say, thank goodness for Blueyonder.

 

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