Virgin Broadband: Tricky? Or not?

Virgin Broadband Home has some good eye-catching headlines - $60/month, no
equipment fees, free landline calls and calls to Virgin mobiles. However,
the terms and conditions are spelt out in multiple documents spread across
two websites.

One of the more interesting conditions is the location restriction.

According to the terms, a customer must only use the service at his
property. If a customer moves, he can re-locate the Virgin equipment but
must notify Virgin. A 'move' must be permanent - the holiday home for two
weeks is not considered to be permanent. If the move is to a different
phone exchange service area, the local phone number will be replaced.
Virgin claims that if you move the equipment to a new property without
notification, you will be called by Virgin and asked to either return the
equipment or file a 'permanent move' application.

Those are the written rules. Presumably they are quite easy to police - at
the very least the modem probably reports the id of its cellular base
station details to central control whenever it connects. It is also
possible to use triangulation to determine the location of the modem within
100 metres.

How do things work in practice?

Well, I received a Virgin Broadband modem over a week ago and took it on a
business trip to 4 major cities across a week. I used it at my hotel room
in the evenings and in offices during the day. I also used it at several
homes an offices in my home city.

Virgin Broadband and Phone performance? Not bad - but that's not the point
of this post. The point IS that despite the nasty threats, Virgin has never
contacted me either by email or voice to tell me to bolt the box to my desk
at home and keep it there.

The rules, I suspect, are the rules. My observation so far is they can be
broken without consequence.

(PS: I saved a bundle on hotel broadband charges, typically $20/day, by
doing the above. Also saved a lesser amount because of the free phone
calls. Nice.)