Double bah

[simont]

My broadband connection has started working again. It's been down for three days, and annoying as I was finding it I was also rather hoping it would stay down until the NTL engineer arrived, so that he could see it being down right in front of him and also so it would be obvious whether he'd really fixed anything or not. Now I have a nasty feeling he'll prod ineffectually at it and fail to address the root cause.

Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to find an alternative means of receiving broadcast TV and say goodbye to NTL completely…

Comments

[keithlard.livejournal.com]

I've never known a company to engender such fury and disgust from its customers as NTL. People hate them so much they set up web sites to say how crap they are, and wander the streets telling anyone who'll listen about their terrible service.

They're like the reverse Dyson.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_kent/]

I fail to see how he's going to address the root cause - that the cable was laid by lowest-bidding mini-cable companies, to a range of standards, that NTL subsequently bought up. I used to work for Telewest, and the prevailing opinion pre-broadband rollout was that it was basically impossible to provide a service at all. That the cable companies manage to strap anything together at all is pretty surprising.

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to find an alternative means of receiving broadcast TV and say goodbye to NTL completely.

Apparently most TVs nowadays can recieve five channels free using something called 'analogue broadcasting'. I'm not sure how easy this is to set up since there aren't adverts on the BBC telling me how to do it like with digital.

Appologies for the sarcasm :).

[simont]

This is something you do if you have a TV aerial accessible to your home, isn't it?

My flat doesn't have one, or at least no obvious connector for one. The best suggestion I've so far heard is that I could mount an aerial inside the loft and run a cable from there to the TV, which sounds like a lot of money and effort with no guarantee of success so I haven't tried it yet.

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

I can watch telly quite successfully dangling a coat-hanger out of the back of my telly upstairs.

[drswirly.livejournal.com]

I have an external TV aerial hanging from my bedroom ceiling, and it provides perfectly acceptable reception. Ceefax goes a bit wibbly in certain weather, but otherwise it's fine.

If you try it, you might be able to return the aerial if it doesn't work, so you'd only have wasted the money on a few metres of aerial cable. Plus, you can hang small items of cutlery from the aerial, as I do.