more on : Strung Up With Cable TV

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 11:08:29 +0000
From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell () newcastle ac uk>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on : Strung Up With Cable TV
X-Sender: nbr () popin newcastle ac uk
To: dave () farber net
Hi Dave:

> you can also subscribe to just the cable and phone line for
> £13.50/month (its priced so you have to get a phone line). that's
> generally equivalent to $40 for broadband and $25 for tv, in terms of
> equivalent UK spending power, despite being 1.9 dollars to the pound
> right now. i should point out that the telewest organization is a
> complete disaster (read: nightmare) in terms of ordering, provisioning,
> customer service, billing, response to repair problems, and use of the
> internet to accomplish all of the above -- but this
> is all typical here.

I beg to differ. I may just be lucky (not just in not living in London or 
the South of England! :-) but my experiences with Telewest Broadband here 
in Newcastle have been excellent so far. I've had it nearly two years, the 
installation of the line from under the pavement (sidewalk) to our house 
was done very competently, as was the setting up of my iMac. The engineer 
who did all this really knew his stuff.

Some months later when I wanted to connect via Airport, that was something 
their service people, whom I contacted by email, couldn't help me with. But 
I found just the right information in an article on the Applecare web site, 
and used the Telewest web-site without difficulty to make the necessary 
reconfiguration. (I then contributed a note on using Airport to the 
Telewest web-site, as a result of which a number of Apple users of Telewest 
have since contacted me - somewhat unnecessarily - for further details,)

Since subscribing to Telewest I've had connection problems on just three 
occasions. Two were solved simply by resetting the modem, just one was I 
think due to a temporary problem at the Telewest end. I've had no problems 
with billing, either, touch wood.

In contrast, Sky, via whom we get our TV (by satellite), are really a 
complete disaster regarding billing, etc., even thugh they are in much 
better financial shape than Telewest. I made the mistake of being a very 
early adopter of Sky+, a TiVo-like service they provide. It became 
painfully clear that though their technical staff were fine, their sales 
and billing systems were badly broken.

Cheers

Brian

--
School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk   PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232  URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/

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