I was thinking about putting in a complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) ages ago about this but didnt get around to it/couldnt be bothered!

Tonight I saw Ian’s post mentioning he was considering changing to Virgin Media beacuse of the advertised fast fibre optic connection and was reminded of my annoyance over the claims.

It turns out that BSkyB, Talk Talk and a few less idle members of the public did make a complaint. The below two stories cover the situation quite well with ThinkBroadband also carrying quite a few user comments on its page. Essentially Virgin Media as many have probably seen have been advertising fibre optic internet connections direct to the home, the fibre is actually only to one of the street boxes, its copper/steel/aluminium after that. A Virgin Media engineer I was speaking to recently, who works on the core fibre network around London said that it could be anything from 500 to a 1000 households sharing the connection!

• http://informitv.com/articles/2008/02/06/virginmediacleared/
• http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3391-asa-rules-on-virgin-fibre-optic-broadband-claims.html

Amazingly, the ASA quashed the claims, essentially deeming the copper portion of the network insignificant. By the same logic, as ThinkBroadband have pointed out, BT etc could now make the same claim as from the telephone exchange upwards, the ADSL network is fibre.

Wish the ASA had taken a stand with this and the ‘Unlimited’ claims (There’s a nice little piece about this on one of the BBC blogs), hardly surprising so many people are confused about Broadband.

Update (13/04/08): Of course in addition to the above truth twisting, a worrying blow for net neutrality comes with Virgin Media’s CEO Neil Berkett branding it “a load of bollocks”. Crude and worrying words, glad I’m not with them and supporting his point of view any more.

We got a letter from them in the mail today saying, ‘Sorry to hear your leaving, how about sleeping on it?’, this is accompanied by the type of mask you get on night flights. Be nice if they quit with all the marketing gimmiks and actually delivered on the fibre to the home claim!

Ten months ago I was debating what route to go down with home servers, I’ve debated this in my own head for a while and about 6 months ago briefly fired up a spare mini-itx board and a couple of drives as a home Debian based headless server. While it worked, it wasn’t quite what I had previously envisaged as one of my main points was to have something which wasn’t going to cause my electricity bill to sky rocket while at the same time filling as many roles as possible. I discussed these in the previous post, but the main points were:

1. File server
2. Bittorrent capable
3. Low power consumption (as low as possible)
4. Secure external access

One of the embedded linux boxes I had my eye on before was the Bubba, it had its upsides including Debian as a base OS which made it pretty flexible. However, I already had a 500Gb SATA drive sitting around and the Bubba is IDE only.

A little look around and I found the Synology website and a fantastic list of compact low power devices, add to this their forums which include a dedicated section on modding their products and I was pretty much sold on buying something from them. Certainly for me, a company who are willing to openly encourage modifications and further development of their product range is a big attraction.

I chose the DS107+ in the end, only a single internal drive but with an eSATA port and 3 USB2.0 ports, 500mhz processor, 128mb RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, a selection of third party bootstraps, several glowing reviews and the aforementioned forum/wiki it looked like the perfect solution.

I’ve been playing around with it for a week now and am very pleased, its quiet, plays well with Xbox Media Centre and while including an array of useful web apps is flexible enough to let me replace them where necessary.

I’ve replaced the included bittorrent client (rTorrent based) with Transmission/Clutch and set up a few CRON jobs and shell scripts to control it and its running very well. The main reason for doing this is that the included one whilst having a handy desktop download redirector application is based on an old version of rTorrent and doesn’t seed very much (not in the spirit of things really!). The OS is BusyBox linux which is not at the time of writing totally open on the 107, annoying but currently not a big issue.

One other point to add, while putting the drive in I noticed the motherboard headers for a second SATA drive as well. It looks like the DS107 and DS207 products share the same board. Not something which I’m concerned with now, and it would without a doubt void the warranty, but if needed in the future I have a feeling it would take the firmware for the 207 to give me a mirrored RAID.

Here’s a couple of the reviews I found helpful:

• Pro-Clockers
• Xbit Labs