The same situation happened when I moved from Reading to Ipswich. Basically, especially if there isn’t the black coax cable going to your house (not everyone has them) it involves a more expensive set of resources to provide your service and this is booked out on a “flexible contractor” basis or similar with a much longer timescale than Openreach, especially as VM tend to mostly serve residential customers in student/low-income areas and there is no guarantee of service levels.

the reality is they don’t want your business as much as a easier provide (i.e to spend the extra to keep it) and are taking the gamble on you either putting up with the timescale or switching to an Openreach / BT based provider (if there is a Openreach line in the house it can be put on within a few days). And when this happened in 2006 insiders at NTL said I had a “gold customer” rating because I had been with them since 1994 but even then they didnt’ want to swallow the extra cost of a fast tracked install .

I had to go back to British Telecom services because of this and eventually switch to a smaller business-oriented provider (but still using Openreach infrastructure and reselling Opal telecom services). but they only do East Anglia and for small businesses (rtn/VFRmedia actually exists as a sole trader as it does small freelance IT/telecoms projects). However another part of the gamble is that BT and its resellers are often a lot more aggressive on credit checking and not wanting low value customers. This is what “consumer choice” really means, companies can turn down your money if they think you aren’t worth the hassle.

Openreach own the wires and some of the bits in the Telephone Exchange, and do not usually deal directly with end customers. Ofcom forced BT to create this company to increase competition on a “level playing field” but didn’t have the balls to actually (re)nationalise it (but let each ISP / telco rent services at a fair price) which would have made more sense, and benefited both public and private sector. (I think the EU doesn’t allow that for any nation 🙁 )

Access points can be set to whatever name the end user wants them to be, although if users do not change them its often related to the ISP name.

There was a plan for a free/public network called BT Openzone (and sometimes rebranded as FON) which is what yo have probably encountered.

I could never get it to work even when I was with BT….

I tell you no word of a lie – it took me 6 months to get NTL (as they were) to attach a cable that actually gave broadband.

Bearing in mind I was working for them at the time sorting out their complaint letters, you would have thought it would have been easier… had to get written permission from 2 neighbours for the engineer to enter their gardens before it got sorted.

Mind you, I think home internet is a bit of a trap in terms of keeping you locked up in one area. So I don’t use them anymore and haven’t for some years. I plan to stick to very few downloads and mobile internet through a pointer or HTC phone.

Internet and all that is absurdly expensive in the UK compared with other countries. Not only this, but slow too. In Romania they get 100mb/s connections for 4 quid a month.

Aw, that thread title was totally misleading! :hopeless:

@eye. 508598 wrote:

If you have a 3G phone. Get a 3 sim card, top up £15 and buy the £15 add on (unlimited net.) If you change the apn from “three.co.uk” to “3internet” it removes the stupid web filter and your connection acts like one of their mobile broadband sticks. Then just tether it to your PC via wifi/USB. I’ve been using this for years as I have no landline and it’s fast enough, even used to play Xbox live without too much lag.

Bear in mind though folks – this doesn’t work nearly as well if you don’t have a good local 3G cell phone signal. Also phone coverage is partly dependent on usage, so if your local network is saturated with “da kids comparing der bling n stuff” then the connection speed can be patchy.

There are a few laptops with the kit already built in – tablets often have a SIM socket and built in 3G. It’s not so common on laptops or netbooks which need a seperate phone, pointer or tether to take a SIM and make the cell phone connection and also setup a local Wireless WiFI network for other devices.

you could tether your phone but they tend to get pissy about that.