I had a gentleman caller yesterday, virgin. No not him, that's where he was from, come to put fibre broadband in.
I have not been til recently, dissatisfied with Tesco broadband which gave download speeds of about 12 Mb/ second especially as they extended the free broadband element into year 2 meaning I was just paying phone line rental. Year three and my bill went up by about 7 pounds a month which was no big deal, but then Talk Talk took over.
First thing they did was block access to torrent sites.
I trawled the deals on offer for broadband, not necessarily fibre. Virgin were doing a 50 mb fibre option with phone line for £ 21 a month for 9 months, goes up to about 34 after that.
Decided to try that as the worst thing would be I would be stuck with them for 9 months if the performance was rubbish. I couldn't have been wronger !
Took the guy less than half an hour to set things up. The wireless mo down as Wally the Welder calls the router, is over by the window where the junction box for satellite service etc is already wired in as these blocks have been for a while.
This is good, because I have been able to site mo down and both my network hard drives out of sight behind the telly meaning my end of the lounge where there where under the dining table is now looking extremely clutter free.
The mo down has 2 wireless settings it gives off, 2G and 5G as they call it. The 5G is the faster and fortunately all my wireless toys have latched on to that successfully. Did a speedtest and got the reading you see at the top of this post and most have been the same since.
Because this is a high rise block, there's a lot of steel in the construction and despite being a small flat (you could spit as far as the bedroom from the lounge), I've never been able to get a decent wireless signal in the bedroom.
the guy said the Virgin mo down was one of the best around (it's certainly got lots of lights on). Sadly, the signal in the bedroom was piss weak.
A while ago, I bought a repeater which is in the hall, but trying to stream music from the network drives was hit and miss even with a signal strength of mid 50%.
I'm getting a lot better from this network, mid 80% and did a test streaming some video and some music to my phone with little to nothing in the way of drop out.
The one bone of contention which I knew about in advance was site blocking.
To get round Talk Talk's shenanigans, I started using Opera browser (which I like) which in their "turbo" mode routes data through their servers and therefore you could access the sites blocked by the likes of Virgin, BT etc who are all running scared these days.
Somehow, this is not the case with this connection. So, any geeks out there with some simple solution to this for proxy, I'd like to hear from you. Yes, I know about VPN, but I don't want to start paying out money and I want it to be SIMPLE, like just opening a browser.
Talking of the welder as I was, not heard from the little piglet in ages. See, there's been no food on the go with me involved with full time work and being tired all the other time.
You don't write, you don't phone is certainly apt in this instance. Told Bob the Butcher and he just said "bless him"...
Told you the only time you get Wally's attention is when you have food.
Bob's been on form recently. We were talking about something musical and Bob said you day know I've sung in front of the Prince of Wales did ya ?"
I looked at him quizzically. "No" I replied.
"Oh yes, and quite a few other pubs in West Bromwich too".
Fell for it hook line and sinker I did.
Quite a lot of other things going on, but will have to post about that another time. Lots to do this morning.
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