Martyn Drake's Personal Blog
.. and better than ever thanks to an upgraded Virgin Media Hub (I had the 4 before it got destroyed in a power outage; now I have the Hub 5 with Wi-Fi 6 and a 2.5Gbs ethernet port). Combined with my Nighthawk RAX1200 router’s configurable WAN port, I’ve chosen to use the 2.5Gbs port directly to the Hub’s. I can now achieve full download speed whereas it was limited to around 930Mbs before:
And via fast.com:
It’s amazing to think one can go to bed one evening and wake up the next morning to discover their tax bill has shot up over £1,000 thanks to PPI compensation. On the other hand, it could have been a lot worse – and I’m glad this incident has come to light when it has.
Back in 2019-2020 I clawed back some payment protection insurance refunds through a specialist company. Now, I thought that the banks paid the interest on the sum that they calculated they owed me, would send me a cheque, and I paid the specialist company their cut. This is what happened (well, the sending of the cheque and paying the specialist PPI company at least). It worked out well (enough to buy a 32Gb, 4Tb SSD Intel Core i9 MacBook Pro outright – the last one before they moved to Apple silicon). After that, I forgot all about it.
Last month I received a notice from the specialist PPI company to say that they partnered with a new firm to claim back tax from those payments. Thought I’d give it a go given how well things had gone before.
ALAS!
I’ve heard back from HMRC directly to say that I now owe them £600 for the tax year 2019-2020, and £430 for 2020-2021. I hadn’t paid enough income tax. But having been digging around emails (as the original paperwork is now long gone – remind me to do a better job of keeping important financial documents by scanning everything in for future reference), I think I know where things have gone wrong (it’s 5am as I type this – brain working overtime).
There was a statutory 8% interest paid on the PPI reclaim – e.g. interest owed on what I paid into the PPI scheme over the years. It’s that interest that was taxed – not the final sum that I got back from the banks. Hence, it’s highly likely that I should have declared those figures to the HMRC at the time. If that’s the case, I wasn’t well informed by the specialist PPI company!
I’m still trying to get some information out of the company dealing with the PPI tax compensation (as I’m sure I’ll enjoy trying to speak to the HMRC) – but I’ve a feeling this is going to be something I’ve just got to take a hit on – apparently it has to do with the tax rate at which I pay – I don’t think either the original PPI compensation company or this tax company took that into consideration. PAYE really spoils you in that you don’t have to think about tax as often as, say, somebody who is self-employed has to. Or if you’re American – how I’d hate those tax returns 😉
As the old saying goes – there are only two things certain in this life: death and taxes.
In other news – I’m rejoining Virgin Media broadband (Gig1 tier) which should supply their new Hub 5 which uses a newer, better (lower latency) chipset than the Hub 4 and is hopefully less liable to die during a power outage. Which reminds me I really must buy a cheap UPS with surge protection. While I’ve been enjoying the o2 mobile broadband with the Nighthawk M6 mobile router – but the latency is a killer – especially if I want to use GeForce Now to play a game of Fortnite or Death Stranding PC.
Over the last week, my village suffered a power cut during the middle of the night. I know this because whenever it happens the lights come on when the power is restored. Usually not a problem, I just need to wait until everything boots back up and I can remotely turn off the lights from bed using my iPhone. This I did, and went back to sleep.
I woke up again when the lights came back on about 20 minutes after the first incident. But this time I couldn’t turn them off with Apple’s Home app. Going downstairs, the lights of the Virgin Media Hub 4 were on, but a static white. Logging into my Netgear Nighthawk router, it wasn’t t able to get an internet connection from the Virgin Hub. Checking Virgin’s web site on my phone (which initially wouldn’t tether to the Mac) there wasn’t any reported issues at the time (nor were there later on in the morning) apart from some work being carried out on the 8th August.
Thankfully I could turn off the lights without internet access (but if I were to use Siri, it requires internet access to turn off devices which is absolutely bloody ridiculous) and just went to bed. I called Virgin later on and after a period of 9 thousand centuries, I was put through to somebody who tried all the remote tests and couldn’t access the Hub at all. So, they booked an engineer. I said it’s likely only to be the hub – it probably didn’t like being interrupted like that (for example, given the time of the outage, it may have been performing a firmware update which must never be interrupted). I asked if they could just send out a replacement Hub and I’ll return the old one. Nope, it’s got to be an engineer and I can’t get one for two weeks.
At this point I also check my contract and was surprised that in 10 days time the minimum contract term expires and I can cancel otherwise face an extra £15/month. While Virgin have generally been very good, this was one situation where I feel they could have done much better and failed. And that’s cost them.
But it’s also cost me too, because I’m still without broadband here and I’m just thankful that I have EE’s top tier package for the iPhone that allows a very generous tethering allowance. But it got me thinking – what I really need is a backup line. Something that doesn’t require physically cables but I can easily switch my entire home network to it should I need to.
As my contract on an o2 phone is coming to an end soon, I’ve bought one of these doodads: a Netgear Nighthawk M6 5G Mobile Wi-Fi router along with an unlimited O2 data package. What this means is that not only can I take it wherever I go (as it can be battery powered), but also keep it at home and hook up the switch with all my devices to it as a backup router. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll give my opinions as to how well it works and how cost effective it is when I do.
Meanwhile the search of a replacement broadband provider begun, and it is the biggest pain in the arse I have endured in many, many years. Firstly, many of the providers that had G.FAST products don’t have them in this area anymore. In English: packages with over 300Mbs or over are not available anymore. Whether this is because the local exchange is at capacity, or whether the ISP has dropped it, I don’t know. I looked at going back to Zen, but the best they can do is 80Mbs. A shame, because I could do with a static IP. Bearing in mind I’ve been used to gigabit speeds for downloading and 100Mbs speeds for uploading.
I also looked at Andrews & Arnold Ltd., a highly respected ISP within the tech community that could provide me with everything I wanted. Except – bloody hell – it’s expensive. The current quote is:
£100 + VAT for the installation
£60 + VAT for the modem (which is, presumably, the Huawei (thought they were banned) MT992)
£65 + VAT per month for a metered package (2Tb/month)
£20 + VAT for a hardware firewall (the Wi-Fi router I have would sit behind that)
Expensive. I spoke with a couple of sales folk and they said that their experience with the G.FAST speeds (e.g. 300Mbs and up) wasn’t as mature as their slower and more mature offerings. Plus the ordering system is broken too (and still is at the time of writing – when you ring them they ask you to email them).
So I’m not happy about any of that.
There was an alternative provider called Cerebus Networks Ltd. which could offer what I wanted, in a similar vein to A&A, but their prices are even more expensive when it came to the set-up fees. And this is without buying a router from them. It’s not stipulated how the connection is presented, either. Do I need to buy an MT992 modem from them? In any event, they’re out of the running.
The stupid thing is that I don’t need a new telephone line. The BT line I have here was last used with G.FAST many years ago and probably only needs a bit of TLC from an engineer to get it working and activated again. It has the necessary filters and has separate telephone and RJ11 jacks. Even so, nearly £200 for an engineer call out to activate a line is fecking silly money.
Looking at the regular consumer ISPs, I was also bitterly disappointed. Especially with Sky which is now offering a Wi-Fi 6 router but is advertising it incorrectly. It’s only available for VSDL2 and FTTP customers, it doesn’t feature G.FAST or ASDL support. But that’s not mentioned on their site, and I spent two days with Sky trying to figure out why it couldn’t be added to an 145Mbs Ultrafast order.
And this is what REALLY pisses me off – the complete lack of technical information on ISP sites. The situation comes close to the following conversation from my favourite of books (with apologies to Douglas Adams for changing “notice” to “specs”):
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the specs, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
What I’ve effectively got to do now is to use the ISP’s router for main internet connectivity and DHCP (the ability to assign internal IPs to devices) and my existing Wi-Fi 6 Nighthawk router as a glorified access point. That’s fine. I chose EE in the end because I already have so much with them as it is, so there are some benefits to using them (more data allowances, discounts, etc.) but the downside is, like BT, they increase the price every March in line with inflation which – at the moment – is an absolute bastard. And I’m committing to 2 years.
I looked at Plus Net, but they don’t have the speeds. TalkTalk has a reputation plus their router doesn’t have good DHCP configuration options, apparently. BT is more expensive than EE despite being practically the same product, so EE it is. Vodafone, BTW, simply fell over and did this – hardly encouraging as a potential customer:
And that’s not without technical glitches during the EE ordering process:
SIGH.