streamlining domestic comms

We installed Virgin fibre broadband at the new place, which seems to reliably operate at 200Mb/s, somewhat faster than the supposedly lightning fast 34Mb/s BT infinity 2 we had previously.

It has created a chance to rebundle the rest of the household communications network.

We scrapped the idea of a Sky dish and now have Virgin for TV as well as its fast broadband. To be honest, the menu system is not quite a good, but it may be also that we've a 15 year Sky habit to break.

We also ditched the idea of a BT phone line and now use Vonage for cheap dial anywhere VOIP phone calls, delivered through standard BT DECT phones, but also including virtual extensions to our mobile phones. It works a treat and is kind of connect and forget.

Then to move the mobile phones onto new SIMs. This was away from the inexpensive O2 tariff to an even cheaper Virgin one (half the price). The new one doesn't seem to have any practical monthly limits on any of the services (voice, data, messaging etc.) The roaming is good too and the Vonage virtual extensions work away from home, in both directions as I accidentally discovered in Exeter the other day.

The whole transfer took a couple of days, and along the way the O2 retention people offered me a half price tariff if I decided to change my mind. Sorry, guys, you were too late and your monthly fees had started to drift upwards.

The other piece of the jigsaw has been to clean up the multitude of streaming subscriptions. Annoyingly, the main providers like Virgin, Apple, Amazon, BT Freeview, Sony etc will provide some, but not all, of the services through their devices.

Day to day telly works fine on the Virgin box, but I still need a separate Apple TV for all the home system (iTune) movie and TV libraries to work properly. Nowadays the Apple TV does also support most of the other subscriptions: Netflix, Amazon, iPlayer, ITVHub and tv player to name the majority. For the mostly abandoned other TVs I decided to try the Roku stick as a way to manage most things else. It's a case of 'so far, so good'. It also supports most of the above, except iTunes although PLEX support can work for the home library. It all seems to be simple to run too, although I've now our set our Logitech Harmony hand controllers to work with it (took 10 minutes), so we still have one remote control for all the main systems.

The Roku plugs into the HDMI HDCP2.2 on the back of a telly and uses a traditional (big) USB socket on the TV to draw its power. The little cable supplied has a built in wifi aerial, hence its slightly bulky appearance, although once installed behind the TV it is for all practical purposes, invisible.

So, a vastly different set of comms here, which doesn't need a dish, BT phone line or even a roof aerial. It's at least 6 times faster, and also considerably cheaper. 21st century, or what?

Next will be to simplify the voice control.