Broadband for Oldies

BigTezza

Hi

Apologies if this is covered somewhere else here but I'm toying with the idea of getting my parents (who are in their 70s and rather technophobic) online. I'm only at the preliminary stage at the moment as I'm sure that the stress of training them how to turn a laptop on and off will no doubt kill me before we get to installing broadband!! However......

They currently have basic phone and TV via Virgin and I think the RRP of their basic broadband is £25pm which is a bit too much for two oldies on State pensions considering the use it would get.

They would be using an old (7 years) laptop of mine or something similar if that one is too old for the task.

They would only be using it to send emails to friends and relatives, maybe send/receive the odd picture or two - nothing excessive like downloading DVD sets of Countdown or using Skype and I doubt it would be used on a daily basis.

I'm in IT (although never used wireless or mobile dongles) so I could probably get to grips with setting up a solution but at the moment I'm not sure what the best solution would be.

I understand that you can get mobile dongles and use broadband on a PAYG basis and on the face of it that would sound ideal but that is a new area to me. I don't know what costs I/they'd be looking at and speed, coverage, reliability of connection etc.

Has anyone set up similar for their own Wrinklies and could maybe give me some ideas to mull over?

Cheers

bob_man_uk

if you want simplicity then i would recommend Three's Mifi dongle and with the latest device (Huawei e585) is a simple case of one button on and off, it automatically connects nothing to worry about.

costs are about £40-£50 for the dongle and prices start at £10 for 1gb limit. see three's site

t-mobiles system is better imo, you pay for bundles, such as £15 for a months usage and it will continue to work even if you somehow manage to use all the bandwidth. the difference is that tmobile use USB dongles and it may run very slowly on an old laptop (usb1)

aerostar

As they have TV AND phone, I suggest you/he talk to Virgin and ask how much the addon for lowest speed broadband would be, you could also suggest that if the cost is too high that they may consider going to SKY, if they think they might loose a customer, it could be that they addon very cheaply or dare I say Free.

Note Virgin will probably only want to talk to the current person named on the bill, so I suggest that he calls them, and ask them to speak directly to you, if they agree he can just hand the phone over.

(Had a problem with sky at friends, they would not speak to me directly, they talked to the bill holder, who then told me what was said, I answered, and then bill holder relayed. )

I would also setup the computer with them as a 2nd user, with no administration rights, and remove all but essential icons on the desktop to make it as simple as possible.

bob_man_uk

you can be there, they get the bill payer to confirm that they give virgin the right to talk to you on the bill payers behalf... though if a password is set up, they dont usually probe into who owns the bill, just dont say "im calling on behalf of" as they will then ask to speak to the bill holder to confirm they can actually speak to you.

gonzo127

to be honest the mobile broadband would probably not be the best bet since most of them only have a 30 day limit on the 'credit' so they would have ot pay out £10 a month anyway although you would need to look into it, the other issue is having to have a usb stick sticking out of the side of the laptop - unless you went for something like the 3 mifi solution

anyways having checked on virgin media website it appears the basic 10mb broadband is £12.50 a month on top of what ever else they are paying so not a shocking amount

anyways this is just a thought for your 'olds' which i have found to be a great solution for my older relitives, and thats to actually skip windows totally and go for something like Ubuntu (if they have never used it they wont get confused by the transition),

i only suggest this since with ubuntu you dont have to worry about virus's, it auto updates all the software installed throught the reposatory as well as the operating system so no confusion about what needs updating and what doesnt, it is more secure by design than windows due to the way root access is done so will be less likely to be killed by accidently, its faster and more stable so less likely to get crashes, and comes with pretty much everyhting you need by default for free (office suite etc)

- the only major thing that can go wrong with older people and ubuntu is if they decide to pop into pc world because they want something since what they would buy would be a windows bit of software, although so long as they understand about the software centre and that they can get everything form there they might need for free they should be fine

JasX

bob_man_uk wrote: »

you can be there, they get the bill payer to confirm that they give virgin the right to talk to you on the bill payers behalf... though if a password is set up, they dont usually probe into who owns the bill, just dont say "im calling on behalf of" as they will then ask to speak to the bill holder to confirm they can actually speak to you.

tbh in those circumstances I tend to just go down the 'impersonate the bill payer' route, usually when I'm trying to fix my parents mobile phone / Sky account issues, they're not usually bright enough to pick up that I possibly sound a litttle younger than someonee in their 50s

bob_man_uk

JasX wrote: »

tbh in those circumstances I tend to just go down the 'impersonate the bill payer' route, usually when I'm trying to fix my parents mobile phone / Sky account issues, they're not usually bright enough to pick up that I possibly sound a litttle younger than someonee in their 50s

yeah i know a lot of people did that, i used to work for virgin lol

simmey

You can get a 3 dongle with 12 months internet (12GB) pre loaded and it costs about £80, they install automatically and are very easy to use, no contract needed, and can be used on any/multiple laptops so if they find they are not using it they can give it to someone else.

They are also for sale on EBay cheeper, some are BNIB.

Go to 3 website first and enter their postcode to see if there is a signal in their area.

BigTezza

Many thanks one and all - I've got some things to think about now. I've got account authorisation on their Virgin account as I arranged their V+ box for them so I can talk to them direct. It took me at least a month to train Mum how to work that so I expect current deal prices to be waaaaaay obsolete by the time I get them online but at least it'll give me some indication if I investigate a few things now.

I've heard of ubuntu and as I QA software I have a few test PCs I could blat with that and see if that would suit the Wrinklies better than Windows - I have been trying to think of the usual nonsense Windows pops up now and again and was going to write them a crib sheet but I think it would be a lifetime's work frankly - I've been in the business over 25 years and I don't know what Windows is on about when it pops up a useless dialog stating "A system error has occured" so how two people the wrong side of 75 would react to it Lord only knows - they'd probably worry that they'd somehow launched a missile or something. I'll definitely look in to that and train up on it myself if it looks good for them. For now I'll just let them play on Windows with no internet access to get them used to using the buttons, creating and saving an email/letter and yes aerostar - re. non-Admin rights and making things look as simple as possible, I'm way ahead of you there my friend )

Thanks again for the advice everyone.

Cheers

kwikbreaks

As they have a VM phone and TV then I'd agree adding the 10Mbps broadband is probably the most sensible way to go if only because this will "just work" and mobile BB may not depending on the location. IMO putting extra complexity into the mix by adding a MiFi unit is a recipe for disaster with first time computer users.

gonzo127

well if you are interested you can run the OS in LiveCD mode, which runs the entire OS from the cd and your systems RAM - yes it will run slower than a proper install however will let you test everything out without making any lasting changes to your hard drive,

just one thing you really do have to remember is - it is not windows.

sounds silly but when i moved over it took a while to remember this properly and to think oh yes if i want to get to my files its under 'places' not 'my computer' in the c drive, and i want to run a program its under 'applications' and not 'start menu'. and the hardest thing of all was i want a program look in the software centre and install it from there instead of googling it, going to the website, downloading it and then running the exe and hoping it isnt a virus