Day 9 - Virgin Broadband

Day 9 was an unexpected whirlwind of activity on top of a full day's work at our day-time jobs.

It all started with an incredible service by Virgin Media. Signed up for broadband yesterday. Our box was delivered first thing this morning. Coming from London where it took us weeks to get broadband in every place we lived in, this was a welcome surprise.

We didn't have much hope it would work, however: all we could connect our Virgin router into was a rusty NTL box that, for some baffling reason, had been screwed into the wooden windowsill of the back reception room. But we connected the Virgin box and - lo and behold - it just worked!

Bandwidth isn't too shoddy either:

(that's the 240Mbps package over wifi)

This brings us one big step closer to being able to move in.

It didn't stop here. Later in the morning, we noticed a small army of Virgin engineers roaming the street and conferring in front of our neighbour's gate:

Michelle went out to find out what was happening. Virgin had sent a team of engineers to do some general maintenance work in the street. They explained that nobody had been down to our end of the street to maintain the cable connections in over 15 years. That accounts for the NTL box in our house (NTL ceased to exist in Ireland 12 years ago).

Michelle mentioned our rusty NTL box. A few minutes later, a Virgin chap had swapped our NTL box for a shiny new Virgin one that wasn't screwed to the window sill:

They also gave us a splitter and mentioned that if we bought a TV, we could just plug it in and get 16 free channels (TV license required). We haven't had a TV in about 8 years or more - our boys have never lived in a house with a TV - they get their screen fix via iPads. In many ways this is a much more addictive experience than the shared viewing at set times on a television. So we're considering our options here.