You wouldn’t believe how complicated it is to work out the best package for telephone, broadband and television for the new house. There are some great offers available to take them all as a package from people who don’t supply our village. There are good packages from people who do supply our village but don’t deliver all the services here. Then there is the BT monopoly situation. (When I mentioned BT on Twitter they started stalking me, let’s see if they start reading my blog too.) You have to have your telephone line installed by British Telecom. It doesn’t matter that you can have rental with someone else when the installation ties you in to a twelve or eighteen month contract. So we’re stuck. BT will have to supply the phone. Then there’s the question of broadband. No one can offer us a fast broadband connection. Oh yes in theory you can have a 20mb connection, if you live in a city with fibre optic cable! We don’t! At best they can give us 0.512mb, so that will be a mere fraction of the connection speed. When we moved to this house, BT couldn’t even give us that, although they kept us waiting several weeks before admitting it. Now let’s see what happens. My Mistress is going to order the phone and broadband from BT and see how long it takes them to either sort it out or tell us they can’t. The stopwatch is now running.
Television is an altogether different matter. We could have HD TV with some suppliers, but we don’t have any HD ready televisions. We could have digital without cost, if we had any digital televisions. So we have good old analogue televisions and there is no cable to the village, so we need a satellite dish if we are to have more than the basic offering. My Mistress voted for the basic channels but then she doesn’t actually watch TV. She did ask that if we have satellite, she’d like to be able to watch the cartoon channel and if I’m honest that will suit me too.