Branson Pickle

According to the Evening Gazette, Blackpool's "broadband connection" is about to become "one of the best in the country".

These opening words in the article left me a bit confused. Is journalist Nick Hyde telling us that Blackpool is so behind the times that it has only one broadband connection? Or maybe, just maybe, he is a lousy reporter that has been fed by Virgin Media's publicity machine and knows absolutely nothing about the subject he is writing about.

The latter, I think.

So lets digest the article. Mr Hyde is saying that people in Blackpool can now acquire "one of the best" connections in the country. Best in terms of what?

I can tell you now that Virgin Media is far from the best Internet Service Provider in the UK at the time of writing. My history with them is well documented on this blog: to summarise:

• I've been a customer since the year dot
  
  
• I was very happy to pay premium price with Telewest due to second to none reliability and completely unlimited connection.
  
  
• Virgin took over and offered me a 20MBit package, then applied throttling across the board once I was locked in a 12 month contract.
  
  
• Their Chief Executive declared that net neutrality is "a load of bollocks".
  
  
• They proceeded to sign deals with music/film lobby groups to monitor internet usage.
  
  
• They are more interested in sucking up to lobby groups and the Government than they are about their customers' privacy.
  

Anyhoo, according to the article in the Gazette we "have only been able to get broadband speeds of between 8Mbs and 20Mbs" in Blackpool. What the hell is a Mbs? A Major bullshit story? I'm sure we get more than 20Mbs in Blackpool from the Gazette alone if that is the case. Another sign that the author, Nick Hyde, is completely clueless about the subject and by this point his journalistic oesophagus was probably full of the advertising that Virgin had sent him.

Next we have a cracking technical case for Virgin being a "massive boost" for business.

Steve Pye, chairman of the Blackpool-based Federation of Small Businesses, said: "My connection at the moment is 8Mb and sometimes it can be a little slow and even crash." Time you switched from Virgin then Steve? Internet connections don't crash: computers do.

He follows on to say: "When you are part way through putting a deal together this ("crashing") is not a good thing." How is 50MBit going to help then? If your connection sucks, increasing the bandwidth will make no difference; you will just be paying more for a connection that still sucks.

I'll give him the benefit on that but it's still not all good with Virgin. Lets say the 50MBit was needed to conclude the deal: with Virgin Media's Stalinist throttling policies the deal could similarly be lost if the connection was used for for more than 30 minutes at full speed. This is because after that point Virgin Media has decided that you are in the top 5% of users and as a result your bandwidth is cut by 75% for the next five hours. It's automatic, there is no discretion and it will not be revoked. Bye bye deal.

I am absolutely baffled as to why our local newspaper is freely advertising Virgin Media and clearly the article writer has done very little of his own research. Given that it's not uncommon for the Gazette to publish Government policy and agenda as news, a part of me believes it's an active push for Virgin to be the preferred provider of broadband services because they are currently the only ISP to have caved in to the Government and the BPI.

Virgin's 50MBit rollout isn't even news. It has been available for ages and in fact I was offered it a few months back when I left them. The only reason to have it is if you have lots of money to waste on having the "fastest".

For normal web browsing and average iTunes use, you don't need it.

For heavy downloading, there are much better and significantly (5 or 6 times) cheaper products around.