So farewell, BT Vision

BT Vision loses another customer.

I received the letter below from BT Vision this morning. From 12th June they're going to move Sky Sports 1 and 2 from the terrestrial broadcast channels to broadband delivery. Also, in the side-box, you will only be able to watch/record one of these channels at a time (due to bandwidth restrictions).

My letter from BT Vision

Now, here in rural Wells, Somerset we have never been able to get BT Vision replay or on-demand services: they stutter and die.  I get c. 20 Mbps down my copper line, but the exchange is just a few hundred metres away. The exchange access equipment is surely dimensioned for intermittent Internet browsing, and can't support high-speed video streaming. This new Sky-over-broadband proposal will trash the main reason I signed up to BT Vision in the first place: cricket, tennis and cycling on Sky Sports.

I called them.

The Indian call centre was just as rubbish as usual. They seemed to believe the letter was a mistake as I'm not in a 'BT Infinity' fibre optic roll-out area. I asked to cancel and got transferred to the Scottish people.

Carol told me it was all a mistake and I'd continue to get over-the-air Sky.

"That's not what the letter says."

She checks. After an inordinate amount of time she tells me "Yes, you're going to be switched, because the technical team has determined your line rate can support it."

I'm weary. The technical team don't understand that with copper, the line rate is hardly an infallible guide to real-time high-speed service delivery which can be screwed up by contention, DSLAM capacity limits, upstream fibre line-rate issues - lots of things.

I have cancelled: the last day of service is Friday 14th June. It's off to Sky now, and BT - this was an own goal, guys!

Breaking Up

Having gone to all the effort to acquire BT Vision and the Sky Sports channels for the cricket, it has been a disappointment that the picture so often breaks up. For days we blamed the weather, but today I succumbed to an outbreak of rationality and called Dave from Wookey Aerials, a TV man of ten years experience.

I liked Dave. He was a stoutly-built forty-something with the odd tattoo - maybe ex-military - but he knew his transmitters and his multiplexes. The problem apparently is that on the digital auto-scan both the TV and the Vision box search from low to high frequencies. This means they pick up the Plymouth transmitter first (which is miles away) and then ignore the higher frequency Mendip transmitter which is on our doorstep.

However, we are so low in the sight-line of the Mendip transmitter that ever close proximity isn't giving us much signal strength for the low-power Freeview multiplexes, which include Dave (19) and Sky Sports (41, 42). As a consequence, Dave suggested I buy a Tesco signal booster (£9.97).

Then he showed me his trick. He set each device in turn on auto-tune, but with the aerial coax pulled out of the wall. He waited until the scan passed 50% (and was safely past the Plymouth frequency band) and then plugged it back in. Voila! The TV/Vision box acquired just the Mendip transmitter channels. It works better already.

As a bonus, he explained that both our SONY TV and our Vision box were HD-ready. All we needed to do was to buy an HDMI cable to replace the SCART one we're currently using and then we'd be able to watch the Freeview HD channels!

Sounds perfect. When I got back from Tescos this afternoon, the first thing I did was to plug in the signal booster pre-amp to improve Clare's already good Sky coverage of the England v. Sri Lankan test.

It made the picture worse.