Virgin Media Customer Service

The Internet was slow. So hideously slow. By dial-up standards, it was still blazingly fast, but this is the age of broadband. I pay a hefty amount for my 10 megabit Internet, so I expect a decent speed in return. YouTube wasn't working properly. I was seeing a few seconds of video, then having to wait about half a minute to see the next few seconds.

I had noticed the Internet going slowly for a while now, but I generally just browse the web at home, so it wasn't a big deal, until I wanted to do something like watch a YouTube video. My service is provided by Virgin Media, which used to be ntl and Telewest, but they're all the same thing now. Calling them up was the usual frustrating affair of going through a series of 'phone menus' and pressing 1 for this, 2 for that, 3 for hurry the hell up.

The chap on the other end was a scouser. The problem was that he didn't know the difference between kilobits and kilobytes. Despite my insistence that I was only able to download at 100 kilobytes per second, he kept insisting that this was the same as 1.25 megabytes per second which was how fast my line was. While it's true that 10 megabits is the same thing as roughly 1.25 megabytes, it's certainly not true that 1.25 megabytes is the same thing as 100 kilobytes. After I asked to speak to his supervisor, he agreed to give me the benefit of his doubt and assume that the Internet was indeed slow.

The problem is caused by the different units of measurement and the similarity of their names. When even people with training are getting confused, how can we make sure that 'unit confusion' doesn't happen? The problem is compounded when ISPs use slang in their advertising. For example, a lot of companies offer "10 meg broadband". If I'm talking about the capacity of a CD-ROM, I might say "700 megs". These are not the same units of measurement, even though they are described with the same word.

File sizes have always been measured in bytes. Bandwidth has traditionally been measured in bits. The fact that there are eight bits in every byte, or ten when transferred via TCP/IP, seems to have slipped most people by. Can't we just change the way ISPs describe their service speeds? Why not call it "one megabyte broadband" instead of "eight megabit broadband"? Of course, this makes it seem slower, so they're doing themselves out of business. Can't we just change the way filesizes are referred to? Highly unlikely, since almost every operating system shows file sizes in bytes and not bits, so it would be very difficult to change all this. We just need to educate people I suppose. I hope that the "iPod generation" of youngsters growing up with various gadgets and the obligatory hideously-decorated MySpace page will learn the difference by themselves.

The result of my phone call to Virgin? There is a problem with the line. But I knew that before I called. It just means I have to wait a few days until it is fixed. When it is, I can apparently claim some partial refund on my account. After all, if you bought a six-pack of beer and there was only one can/bottle in there, you'd take it back, right? Why should bandwidth be any different?