I'm sure others will provide more feedback on the pronto vs Mosaic although I think you have answered your own question.

A couple of comments on your list of points first (the comments especially 1) are based on receiving the specified response from the recipient of the letter and not your listing them in the message)

1) Why should I have to spend £300+ for the privilege of controlling the STB from a pronto
2) Some people are not able to receive ondigital or fit a dish to their property. I'd be surprised if the recipient would make this suggestion anyway)
3) Does it actually support the pace IRDA box it does not mention it specifically on their web site.

Ok now on to my comments

1) I would have thought NTL/Pace can create an updated firmware for the STB that will accept IR as well as IRDA commands, I can't believe this would be a big job as pace normally use IR for most of their other boxes and so big chunks of the code should already exist. This would be the best, as updates would be automatically be sent to the existing STBs. If they are implementing this then they should be asked to provide IR for as many functions as possible, only omitting those where there is a *real* need for the two-way comms that is provided by the IRDA.

2) I was hoping to work with a small company that think they could create a small converter box to receive IR from the pronto and send IRDA out. I don't know for certain if this will actually happen at this stage or even if it can made cheaply.

If we know that something like my point 1 will definitely be done in the future (which I would say is the best solution) then there is no point in me progressing point 2 so I hope we get something useful out of the letter.

You may want to contact www.letsautomate.com to get a feel for the number of people they think want this functionality as providing some kind of numbers may be helpful as you could extrapolate possible numbers across NTLs area.

Trevor

P.S. In response to the two previous replies I would say that yes the quality is not as good (based on comments from people over the months) as I don't know anyone with sky. The reason I use it is I get poor reception of C4 and C5 (not sure that this is such a loss) but don't want to subscribe to additional channels so for £5 a month I get better quality versions of the terrestrial channels and of course the gripping QVC/Shop channels ;-)