We tried moving to Virgin 50Mb/s broadband, unfortunately the latency was so high it was unbelievable and the technical support team didn't even know what latency was. Added to that the WiFi couldn't cover the whole house and the firewall in the "SuperHub" kept dropping connections and customer services tried to get me to pay for support! In the end we moved back to ADSL and got faster page loading times on a line that was about a tenth of the headline speed.

As someone who was a Virgin customer for three weeks before their unbelievable poor service got so bad that we left again under the cooling off period I can say you're right on all of your points but you actually missed a few too:

• * Broadband speed
  The burst speed of the 30Mb line is indeed 30Mb but the effective speed is much lower. The connection suffers from incredible latency, such that the time to load an image heavy page was twice what on I now get on a 7Mb line.
• * Dishonesty
  Not only are the support staff incompetent, they're also outright dishonest. We were sold a package deal and then billed a higher price. Customer services then tried to say the deal we signed up for didn't exist despite it still being listed on the website.

After we left we complained and even the complaints process is just as bad. They fail to respond to letters, offer compensation but don't pay it and are generally a disgrace.

All in all it's a real shame since their V+HD TV box is genuinely better the Sky+HD (when it works), but I'd rather go back to dial-up than deal with them again for any service.

Up till 2001 I was maintaining a PICK based system that had been moved over to jBASE. It was a big improvement, allowing desktop integration and many "modern" features. As far as I know the platform is still being used in many different variants,