The first time I went to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour was in 2015, just after they had added the Hogwarts Express and Kings Cross set to the tour. At the end of November 2019 we made a return visit, mainly to see how different it was dressed for Christmas and with snow. I took a fair few photographs and have posted them to my other blog.
Some of my photographs I thought might make excellent Teams and Zoom backgrounds, so I posted them to the blog and they have proved quite popular.
So here are some more.
Right click the images to download the images for your personal use only.
I’ve had my FTTP connection for over a month now, and I am chuffed with the reliability as well as the speed.
However though some of my devices directly connected to the router by cable can benefit from the 1Gb speed, most of the devices in my house are constrained by the speed of the wifi.
This though was no faster than the built in Airport card, however I could use it on my MacBook which had a slower card and I have managed to achieve speeds in excess of 400Mbps, but not quite the 800Mbps I was hoping for.
I did look for a Thunderbolt 2 to Ethernet adapter which I had used before with my MacBook but they were a lot more expensive.
It was plug and play (which I like and wasn’t the case with the TP-Link adapter) and connected my MacBook to the router via cable and tested the speed.
I was very impressed to get in excess of 800Mb/s via the wired connection.
I never thought I would see the day when my home internet access was constrained by the speed of my wireless network, how things change.
I have had BT Broadband for just under a month now. Got an e-mail from BT saying I could have six months free of Britbox.
Actually I got a similar e-mail a few days ago, but when I clicked the link it said that I couldn’t get the offer as it wasn’t available to me.
I had considered subscribing to the service before, but didn’t want to pay for another service for things I might not watch. However all the classic episodes of Doctor Who was quite tempting. So it was a bit of a no-brainer to say yes to BT.
It was disappointing that the link hadn’t worked the first time, so when I got the second e-mail I didn’t think it was going to work, but it did. It was a seamless sign up process and then easy to download the app on the iPad and the Apple TV.
There is a good selection of content on the service, and I think we will get some benefit from the service. Will I renew in six months time? I think that depends on what content we’ve watched and whether they refresh the content over the next few months.
I think, though I love the speed, one of the key advantages of my new FTTP connection is reliability. I don’t think I’ve noticed if it has gone down or not.
On my old FTTC connection, it was fall over at least once a day or even more. I would usually notice as my Alexa Spot device would show my hub login screen when the connection failed.
Not seen that since we upgraded.
The other key is how much better the BT Hub is over my older (2017) Plusnet Hub was. The strength and spread of the WiFi is much better and combined with the faster speed means that a stable and reliable connection even at extreme distances from the hub in the house. Pleased with that, I was thinking about buying WiFi Extenders, but don’t think I need to do that now.
BT came round yesterday and fitted FTTP or full fibre as BT likes to call it. It was quite a painless process, so much so that I didn’t actually notice that the FTTC connection had been turned off and the FTTP turned on, well I was in the midst of writing an e-mail at the time.
They had to upgrade the terminal outside, drill a hole through the wall and mount the modem and the Smart Hub near some power sockets.
Now we have a 1Gb connection, though the reality with WiFI is that the most I can get is about 500Mb/s, but that is still 25 times faster than what I had before!
The speed and quality of the WiFi signal is much better and is working well It will take a little time to settle in over the next few weeks so the speed will fluctuate up and down. Though for my first Teams call after installation it was working a treat.
Accessing streaming video and downloading files is so much faster, but the other main benefit is better quality WiFi across the house. Though the signal degrades as you move away from the Hub, 20% of 400Mb/s is much better than 20% of 30Mb/s for doing stuff.
I had to go around and reconnect everything to the new wireless network, the Apple devices were the easiest as I could share the password across my devices just by bringing them close to each other.
Where I could use WPS that meant I could connect the printer and some Windows machines. The hardest devices to connect to the new wireless network was the Amazon Alexa devices, but got those done in the end.
Well there was a BT Openreach van outside our house today.
According to the information I have from BT, when they install FTTP, before the day of installation, they come on another day and put fibre between the pavement and the house.
I don’t know if they did that today, but if they did another step on my way to FTTP.
Having placed an order for full fibre from BT I was expecting to have to go through the process of cancelling my plusnet account.
However this was all automated as BT made a request to them, as I was changing provider.
They did make repeated requests to me to change my mind, but the problem was not that I wasn’t happy with them or their service, just that they didn’t provide the FTTP service I wanted. If they did I would have stayed with them.
Alas there wasn’t an easy way to provide them with this feedback, the e-mail I replied to bounced!
