If you've been a long time user of cable and you're getting thoroughly fed up of Virgin Media and their not-so-clever traffic shaping methods, here's how I got myself liberated - it should work for you too, provided you're outside of your initial 12-month contract.
First, call 0845 454 11 11. Once you get through, you'll need to choose Option 4 for Moving Home, then Option 2 for disconnections, followed by Option 1 again in order to confirm.
Hopefully within a matter of a couple of minutes you'll be connected to a real live operator. Once you confirm your address, payment method and what have you, you'll get to the fun part.
After a brief bit of struggle and dispute about why you're leaving - and at least in my case, explaining that my new Be* ADSL2+ installation is working beautifully at a rock-solid 12Mbps, you'll be informed that "Sir, I'm on a BT website now, I can clearly see you can only get up to 1Mbps at your location..."
.
You'll get to fight this fight for a few minutes, and if you can resist the urge to scream "But obviously, you're wrong. I'm in my house now, I should know.", they will - finally - give up and accept that you've given them 30 days notice and give you confirmation of your disconnection date.
Oh, did I mention how marvellous Be* is, on both price and performance? Sure, you'll never get the 24Mbps unless you're living next door to the exchange, but it's better than paying a premium price for 20Mbps and getting a realistic average of 5Mbps.
Now, I've seen some error dialogs in my time. Some are informative, some are incomphrensible and some - like this gem that Sony Ericsson have put together - are just plain scary
What had actually happened (I think) was that it was busy querying my K800i when the signal dropped - I was on a train after all. So I'd rather it have just suggested something along those lines rather than proposing that the world was about to end.
Who'd have thought that a simple "Mobile Networking Wizard" was fraught with such danger?
It's the one time of the year when I spend more than the normal amount of time on online shopping sites. And the same as every other year, it seems like major online retailers have learnt little about user's shopping habits.
One of the common horrors on sites such as debenhams.com is that that the designers seem to believe that people think in terms of brands, rather than categories of items - for example, I've visited the site thinking I'd like to buy a gift for an aunt - maybe something like bubble bath. Easy enough, right?
- Step one, visit the site.
- Step two, go to the beauty section.
- Step three, find the "Bath & Body" range.
- Step four... Select a brand. Huh?
The flaw here is that I can't just browse all the items in the "Bath & Body" section - I have to pick a brand to continue. So now, I need to select a brand and browse through those items; if I don't like what I see, I have to go back, choose another and keep going. Often in these cases I don't even know the brands or have any suggestion of what sort of items that that brand covers - forcing me to navigate continually into areas that I probably don't care about.
Unfortunately for the end user, product managers think in brands whereas most consumers - with perhaps the exception of some high fashion items - tend not to, particularly if they're just trying browse and virtually "window shop" for ideas.
