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virgin media are crap

Virgin Media meet my robot protester

To be honest nobody likes their ISP, most of us are usually happy to pay the monthly bill as long as the internet works reliably, praying that nothing will go wrong requiring us to waste time and energy on remarkably poor technical support – Yes I have switched the router off and on again !

For more than ten years I have been a customer of Virgin Media (VM) who offer DOCSIS  cable broadband in my part of London, and it has mostly been fast and reliable, even though the network infrastructure is rather old dating back to the original Telewest TV Network.

It would appear that following the acquisition of VM by the American Mega Cable conglomerate Liberty Global in 2013 investment in infrastructure has reduced further  resulting in my current issue.

Despite not improving the network infrastructure, VM have continued to aggressively add new broadband customers making the network less robust and as a result the 152Mbps I used to see as a download speed is often reduced to 10-20Mbps during peak times. This state of affairs has been confirmed by VM’s support and complaints staff and they have suggested a fix to the network might be possible in August !

In order to shame VM and warn others of the quality of  their service, I will be tweeting automatically my download speed every 3 hours whenever the download speed is less than the 152Mbps I am paying for. Sorry if you are one of the several thousand twitter followers of mine, perhaps it might be fun to try and guess the speed reported on the next tweet, do feel free to retweet perhaps adding a kitten picture ?

Ok maybe rather juvenile, but it makes me feel better 🙂

If you are interested this is simple to do, just grab this nifty python script and run it on a server on your home network, I’m using my Mac Mini media server but you could run this from a Raspberry Pi very easily !

Roll on August then…

Categories
Blog Concorde

Concorde 204 G-BOAC, Manchester England

G-BOAC was always going to be a bit special for me..

IMG_3731

Not only was Concorde 204 the flagship of the British Airways fleet, is was the Concorde I flew back from New York to London in May 2003. Alpha Charlie is displayed at the Manchester Runway Visitor Park in a small purpose built Hangar. Alpha Charlie is not the most accessible of the retired Concordes as it is operated as a Conference and Wedding Venue – Yes Really !  As a Result you need to book one of the tours which includes a visit to the aircraft to get inside the hangar and take a look around.

The Tours are recommended however, I did the “Technical Tour” which was interesting; but is still aimed at “normal people” rather than real AvGeeks such as myself (modest I know!) This tour includes a walk from nose to tail of the aircraft where various aspects of the design are explained, a chance to sit in the front cabin still in it’s final BA blue Connolly leather interior and a cockpit tour.

The short cockpit tour is well worth the admission, as you get to sit in the Captains seat and admire close up the very best of 1960’s engineering.A aircraft retired for nearly 13 years does not have the same sense of excitement or anticipation as a living machine, so even though I sat in 6D once again, it did not really bring back the emotions of that amazing trip 2003.

then_and_now
G-BOAC Then and Now

I enjoyed  talking to some of the team looking after Alpha Charlie which arrived  in Manchester October 2003, like all of the British Airways operated Concordes it is still owned by the Airline and maintenance is their responsibility  – so a broken windscreen in front of the First Officers seat remains broken until someone from Heathrow can come to fix it.. I would guess the last BA licensed Concorde engineer has retired !

G-BOAC JFK-LHR May 29th 2003
G-BOAC JFK-LHR May 29th 2003

 

Categories
Blog Concorde

Concorde 205 F-BVFA, Chantilly, USA

A National Science Foundation meeting at George Mason University this week, provided the opportunity to visit my favourite aviation Museum, the quite brilliant Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and Concorde F-BVFA.

I’m have often thought it surprising that Foxtrot Alpha ended up in Washington, as it was in many ways the Air France flagship airframe operating the initial services to Rio de Janeiro, Washington, and New York. Foxtrot Alpha also flew more than any other Air France Concorde achieving 17,824 hours by it’s final flight to Washington in June 2003.

This flight itself is interesting in that it was captured on video from a boat below the flightpath across the atlantic which features the distinctive double boom produced by Concorde flying supersonically.