Back to work
May. 27th, 2008 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksWell, not really back to work, since I'm working from home today. It's back to the dentist this afternoon, and she will probably tut-tut when she sees that one of the eyes that connects my descending teeth to the brace wire/ little gold chain has broken. I suspect that the teeth have now descended sufficiently for the matter to be rescuable, in that an ordinary brace frontage is probably (just) feasible. If not, then another descender-aid and chain needs to be glued on.
So, progress on the the teeth front, but not on the broadband front. I strongly suspect that I've been stuck on 500kbps ever since I was "upgraded" to ADSL Max about a year ago; it's just that I hadn't sussed it out before. I've now switched to a different micro filter. And the four-day process repeats. If that fails, I'll try another router (which seem to be available fairly cheaply from Maplin these days), even though the one that I have is meant to cope with ADSL Max.
The simple problem, (and this is repeated at virtually every ISP site) is that they all say that, if something goes wrong, it could be a thousand and one things. However, none of them come up with a simple step-by-step explanation of what they will do to solve it if ADSL Max doesn't work. Because, quite simply, they don't know what to do and the cost of implementing it would make the price packages that they offer uneconomic. The best "guaranteed" deals look to be from IDNet or from Pipex, which offer things like 1:1 contention ratios (I won't touch an ISP that doesn't list that number), static IP addresses and next-business day engineer call-outs. But (and this is the interesting part), these are 2MBPs. Only the toss-pots are offering "up to 20Mbps" or whatever, because, it appears to me, no-one can offer a guaranteed 8MBPs rate, even if you live within 50 feet of the exchange and have newly installed wiring. The "perrpetual testing" system of ADSL2 to avoid loss of data might strike Pete D as fiendishly clever. But I think the problem is that it is too fiendishly clever for the average Joe in a telecoms company (engineer, call centre person, etc -- oh, and me!) to deal with. In this, very specific sense, it's a flawed system.
Obviously the guaranteed rate and 2M BPs service comes at a fairly horrible price (£70 a month plus VAT for the service I was lookinga t on ID Net) and, to be honest, I'm not sure that it's really worth my while at the moment.
I read a whole raft of complaints online about ADSL Max and I fear that most of them side with me rather than Pete D. The semantics on whether it's a flawed system or a flawed delivery system are lost on them (and me). It's a bit like a super-duper engine that can't cope with a 19th-century fuel delivery system. The technicians might say "the engine is great, it's the delivery that's poor", but the consumer says "what use is a great engine if the delivery system can't match it?" In fact, it could be argued that the great engine is a bad idea. You should start by upgrading the delivery system, and then think about improving the engine. But, well, that's geekdom for you.
The most helpful e-mail was from the anonymous user who has been through the same thing. He went through the ritual of talking to BT Broadband, but when that go nowhere, he emailed the chairman, and got put back onto the 2MBp system within a week.
2MBP is absolutly fine for me at the moment, so that looks like the best solution. I know that when I was on 2MBp it was working at near that speed.
++++++
So, progress on the the teeth front, but not on the broadband front. I strongly suspect that I've been stuck on 500kbps ever since I was "upgraded" to ADSL Max about a year ago; it's just that I hadn't sussed it out before. I've now switched to a different micro filter. And the four-day process repeats. If that fails, I'll try another router (which seem to be available fairly cheaply from Maplin these days), even though the one that I have is meant to cope with ADSL Max.
The simple problem, (and this is repeated at virtually every ISP site) is that they all say that, if something goes wrong, it could be a thousand and one things. However, none of them come up with a simple step-by-step explanation of what they will do to solve it if ADSL Max doesn't work. Because, quite simply, they don't know what to do and the cost of implementing it would make the price packages that they offer uneconomic. The best "guaranteed" deals look to be from IDNet or from Pipex, which offer things like 1:1 contention ratios (I won't touch an ISP that doesn't list that number), static IP addresses and next-business day engineer call-outs. But (and this is the interesting part), these are 2MBPs. Only the toss-pots are offering "up to 20Mbps" or whatever, because, it appears to me, no-one can offer a guaranteed 8MBPs rate, even if you live within 50 feet of the exchange and have newly installed wiring. The "perrpetual testing" system of ADSL2 to avoid loss of data might strike Pete D as fiendishly clever. But I think the problem is that it is too fiendishly clever for the average Joe in a telecoms company (engineer, call centre person, etc -- oh, and me!) to deal with. In this, very specific sense, it's a flawed system.
Obviously the guaranteed rate and 2M BPs service comes at a fairly horrible price (£70 a month plus VAT for the service I was lookinga t on ID Net) and, to be honest, I'm not sure that it's really worth my while at the moment.
I read a whole raft of complaints online about ADSL Max and I fear that most of them side with me rather than Pete D. The semantics on whether it's a flawed system or a flawed delivery system are lost on them (and me). It's a bit like a super-duper engine that can't cope with a 19th-century fuel delivery system. The technicians might say "the engine is great, it's the delivery that's poor", but the consumer says "what use is a great engine if the delivery system can't match it?" In fact, it could be argued that the great engine is a bad idea. You should start by upgrading the delivery system, and then think about improving the engine. But, well, that's geekdom for you.
The most helpful e-mail was from the anonymous user who has been through the same thing. He went through the ritual of talking to BT Broadband, but when that go nowhere, he emailed the chairman, and got put back onto the 2MBp system within a week.
2MBP is absolutly fine for me at the moment, so that looks like the best solution. I know that when I was on 2MBp it was working at near that speed.
++++++
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 01:07 pm (UTC)I am with Metronet's pay-as-you-go service, get 7.1 Mbps for £18 a month and can give a month's notice to terminate whenever I please.
There is a 23.8MB limit per month and have never gone over. All over a BT line.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 02:15 pm (UTC)I was, as usual, overcomplicating my case, and the details got lost in translation: so here goes.
(1) It is a flawed system because it relies on under-paid serfs to service it and over-paid marketroids to hype it.
(2) It is a flawed system because it relies on the economies of scale to sell it, but not the economies of scale to make it work.
(3) It is a flawed system because, at the end of the day, and even with local loop unbundling, you're still dealing with an exchange controlled by BT. This means that the barriers to entry are quite high. As AardvarkCo, I would have to invest in a couple of DSLAMs at the exchange (£50K each, but they'd each support around 32,000 users). I'd have to put a Radius system in place to deal with monitoring and charging (another £50K min). I'd be using the same copper wire (thus local loop unbundling), but I'd have to choose between renting space off BT's back-haul to the core network -- the fibre-optics bit -- or else building my own at a prohibitively expensive price.
That's before marketing and jumping through regulatory hoops, and buying the ADSL modems, and training customer support staff. (The cost of the latter appears to be effectively £0, btw, judging by the results.)
My erstwhile company spent around £10 million trying to do all this inside the M25, which would clearly be the UK market with the best potential. They'd got all of the above right (with a few minor glitches to do with Alcatel being "a bunch of Belgian pirates," to quote my Belgian manager), and the game still wasn't worth the candle.
Not only is the technical stuff not flawed; not only is it well-tested; not only is it more like a Wankel Rotary Engine than a Saturn V rocket booster; it is, as I pointed out, relatively straight-forward to scale up to, say, 100,000 users. All it takes is investment in software. These people will not do that. The cost of the software to monitor a single line (and to control the throughput as required) is probably around £2million. The incremental cost for the next 99,999 users is around a cent each. (Plus maybe £100,000 for a couple of Sun servers, which is by-the-by, really).
The software is the bit that "profiles" your ATU-C to ATU-R connection (ie your modem to the plug into the exchange, aka "the copper wire with clever bits added). The software is the bit that adjusts your profile and redistributes packets between the possible 512 buckets. The software can evern produce a pretty graph to demonstrate to non-technical morons in customer support where the problem lies. (Well, it's more of a bar-chart, really.) The software is the only bit that currently makes a difference, frankly, wince we're at the technological limits of twisted-pair copper wire.
No, a guarantee of 8MBS, whatever the distance to the exchange, is basically a lie. The physical mathematics of the matter, are, however, very simple indeed. In 99% of the cases it comes down to attenuation, which works on the inverse square law. If you can get 500KB at the maximum distance of 4km (and I'm guessing here), you can get 2MB at 1KM, and 8MB at 1km.
This will be the case for 90% of connections, irrespective of alien spaceships beaming electromagnetic pulses down at your local high-streeet, or the fact that, as a hobby, you have a fully-functioning morgue in your kitchen.
The other 10% can be measured and dealt with by a competent engineer -- or, in extreme cases, putting a signal booster in between.
But why would anybody do this when the competition is equally pitiful, and only 1% of users are smart enough either to notice or to care so much that they actually change providers?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 02:23 pm (UTC)From where you are, they should be able to "guarantee" 2MB, in the sense that this is a commercial guarantee rather than a technical one.
This, after all, is how you got 2MB in the first place.
The difference between ADSL2 at 512 buckets and ADSL at 256 buckets is not the rocket-fuelled hyper-complicated hardware technology: it's the untrained idiots "providing a service" and the missing software that nobody can be bothered to write.
I mean, ask yourself.
If they were really serious about the software, would they have got a historian from Oxford to write it for them?
(I'm not going to like the answer to that one, but it has to be asked.)
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 04:07 pm (UTC)I got my broadband from a company called Zen Internet until six months ago, and I was extremely impressed with the service and particularly the customer service which was excellent, although I never had any of the problems you have had.
But as they are a small company, based in Britain, with a very high reputation, I would imagine that you would be able to speak directly to the tech guys who had built the system, rather than a bloke in a call centre in Bangalore who'd learned customer service from a dvd that morning.
If you wonder why I left them, it's because i'm a sucker for speed, and when Be started advertising 24mps for £18 with unlimited downloads, I decided to give them a try (and btw, Zen handled the outward migration impeccably). I have had no problems with them either, and downloading stuff is lightening fast (often 1.8Mb/sec from sites with high upload speeds like MS windows update). But i'm not so sure that their tech support is of the quality that Zen was.
Titmus