On a wet Friday afternoon in July – oops something went wrong with the broadband order

I’ve procrastinated long enough. I’m ordering Virgin Media’s 152Mbps broadband only service. At least I’m trying to. As you can see from the featured image without too much success so far.

My logic in choosing Virgin is simple. I want the fastest broadband I can get. With Virgin I will get near to 152Mbps download and 12Mbps up. With FTTC I can only get 30Mbps down and 7Mbps up. Simples.

Also I don’t need a phone line – line rentals are all around £17 and are a rip off. That’s with expensive call charges on top. All I need is a VoIP line that I can use from a dect phone, IP phone or indeed my mobile phone. With the latter I can use it anywhere in the world. Also I don’t trust the mainstream telephony providers’ call charges. They are around 10p for a geographic number cf near to 1p for VoIP and their non geo pricing is not at all transparent. This has been made worse by Ofcom’s recent dictat on non geo number charges.

There are some tempting offers for bundles that include other services such as TV. To be honest there is rarely anything on worth watching on the telly. I don’t feel deprived by not taking up any of these offers.

All I need is a connection. The rest is all an Over The Top service somewhere on the internet.

I do have misgivings with signing up with Virgin. Non UK call centre is a big one. That really is crap. Bufferbloat is another, equally crap. I don’t think I’m likely to be caught by their upload limits and trigger traffic management/throttling. We shall see.

The Virgin contract is 12 months. I’ll be keeping you updated re progress which at the moment is pretty non existent because as I’ve already mentioned, oops something went wrong!!!

See previous post on how to choose a broadband provider here.

… bit later – Virgin clearly have some problem with the broadband bits on their website – see screenshot below. Can’t even get onto the product pages now.