Posts by rhydian 424 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2008
"Possiby because the Govt isn't offering them a big fat subsidy to do so, either directly ala the rural BB rollout or indirectly via an inflated connecton charge."
Fact is that the only other serious bidder for the work (Fujitsu), basically said "We want all of the contracts. If we don't get all of the contracts we won't do it).
I can understand where Pat is coming from regarding the "fun" of handing a major manure-fan interface.
For me, it's mainly the challenge of getting whatever has gone bang back up ASAP, with the added bonus of being able to "bend" rules and procedures that you know add nothing and simply cause delay. It's the challenge of focusing on the problem and find a workable (as opposed to the "right") solution fast that gives job satisfaction for me.
As for management, yes they should be kept informed, but its usually during such events as these that a "less is more" attitude to management input works best. Especially if you have non-technical management involved.
"There are far, far more cell sites than there are transmitters for public broadcasting."
I can believe that, but as I say, in my experience of rural areas cell sites and TV transmitters (local fillers, not main sites) are usually on the same mast or tower, for the simple reason that most villages large enough to warrant a TV filler mast are also likely to be large enough to warrant a cell site. Also, you only have to deal with one "landlord" (Arqiva) and there's definitely power available.
A few reasons:
Pylons, electricity poles and phone poles don't always go where you want a mast to go. For example, where I grew up the phone and electricity lines followed the valley floor, not the mountain tops where you'd want a phone mast.
Wind turbines aren't static, they rotate to face the wind, and those big spinning metal blades may not help RF propagation much
Big tress usually have preservation orders on them, so you can't nail your kit to them. Also, wet leaves are very effective at blocking RF.
"Well you are lucky, in Germany the first carriers are letting their ISDN equipment rot. So it's not uncommon to have frequent line breakdowns... or even occasional crosstalk between channels. (How is that even possible on ISDN? And no, I can rule out analogue crosstalk as the A/D-conversion happened in a controlled place far away from any analogue phone line or people speaking.)"
It seems that in the UK the ministry of defence has basically told BT/Openreach that they can't kill off ISDN, so we still get a decent service. Our only issue was last winter when violent lightning storms cooked our ISDN30 termination unit at least twice. It seems the standard surge protectors that would be fitted to an ISDN line aren't fitted to ours as the attenuation penalty would be too great for the line to function. Luckily we're on next-day fault repair as standard.
"You always still have a PSTN gateway, but you move as many people off it as you can. A slightly higher internet connection is going to be cheaper than multiple landlines."
Out here, internet connections come in two flavours: Expensive or Unreliable
Unreliable is the current ADSL link. Approx 6mbit, so not the worst around, but the local exchange, despite serving a sparsely populated area, regularly suffers contention. Add to that past experience of losing ADSL for two days versus an ISDN line that only seems to die if we suffer direct lightning strikes and ISDN wins on unreliable.
Yes we could go for a leased line, but a 2mbit (burstable to 10mbit) leased line here costs over £1,700 a month (no, that isn't a typo). Our 12 channel ISDN30 is around £170 a month so is a no-brainer for us.
We've deployed VoIP/SIP trunks at other offices (usually those with FTTC) and it works well. If we ever get FTTC/FTTP service to our main office then I will probably bin the ISDN30, but until then it can keep solidering on.
Until you move out to the countryside, where internet bandwidth is at a premium, and ADSL reliability takes a nosedive.
Yes an ISDN30 old and expensive, but its pretty much bombproof. No contention issues if the exchange is overloaded, no waiting for BT Wholesale to fix the DSLAM in the exchange (again) and most telcos regard them as a priority.
First of all, this is a great piece, discussing VoIP while not treating it as a panacea. We've been looking at SIP trunks etc. for some of our offices, and have a lot of legacy kit.
The main consideration for us is reliability. Many of our sites are in rural areas, where even 4mbit broadband could be considered luxurious. In these kinds of areas, leased lines/EFM are seriously pricey, and for our use an 8 channel ISDN30 does the job well. Yes ISDN is old hat, but its still with us for a reason, it is nigh on impossible to kill it. We have moved to hosted SIP/VoIP in some of our smaller new build offices, but only where FTTC was available. We also stick voice handsets on our ADSL lines for service when the phone system UPS runs out of juice during power cuts. Also, ADSL can suffer from local/exchange congestion (even on 20:1 business packages) while ISDN gives you all the channels you're paying for no questions asked.
That is not to say I'm against VoIP on the internal/site side. Our last new build office phone system was an Avaya IP office with proprietary IP handsets. This was because we needed it in a hurry, and with proprietary systems its a lot easier to get a service contract than to find someone willing to support something more "homebrew", even if it is simpler and more reliable. At our largest site I've been uprading our inter-building links, and while I have put in 20 pair cables for our Proprietary Nortel system, I've also ensured that there are spare fibre cores to cover any eventual upgrade to VoIP.
"Don't knock our BBC - it might get privatised, then what?"
Then we can all stop being forced, by law, to spend £145.50 every year on a corporation we may or may not even watch.
"Compare it to ANY other broadcaster ..."
You mean all those private broadcasters I can choose whether or not to pay for?
@Stuart 22
Unless you want bikes to carry properly visible registration plates (just like motorbikes and cars) any police detection of "stolen" bikes would involve either having to upturn and check every bike in a cycle parking rack or officers stopping cyclists in the street to "check their details". Neither of which is really workable on a large scale. As mentioned before, bikes are much too easy to hide (in plain sight or in the back of a transit) and are still ridiculously easy to steal.
As for these cars being "Range Rovers and BMWs" the simple fact is that its no longer worth stealing anything much lower value than a BMW, Audi or Mercedes. Aunt Doris' Fiesta won't yield much in saleable parts, so they're usually taken for the fun of it or during house break-ins to take the loot home. Rangies and BMWs usually attract the more violent organised crime gangs, with reports of people being threatened and attacked so they hand over the keys. I've never heard of someone being threatened at knifepoint if they didn't hand over a set of bike lock keys.
OK, so some bikes have stamped frame numbers.
First of all, are these a legal requirement?
Are these held centrally like car VIN details?
Are they required to be tied to a specific identity/registration document?
If I owned an expensive (£1000+) bike, I'd treat it exactly as I would a classic car with no anti theft devices fitted. I'd get a proper aftermarket lock and alarm and park it in secure areas only.
It took car manufacturers fitting standard immobilisers (and enough years to see off most old cars without) to cut "bread and butter" car thefts. What's needed is for the cycle industry to do the same regarding decent anti-theft measures.
And as for the police caring more about cars, try getting them interested in a 10 year old banger being pinched...
Things are a bit less sophisticated with UK copper theives.
They take a Transit Tipper, lift a manhole cover, tie a chain to the underground copper bundle then simply drive off, tearing out the bundle and stuffing it on the back of the van.
My parents' microwave blew up the other day, a day before my sister was due to visit them with her baby daughter. So, it was decided that, as I live closest to any kind of electrical shop, I would go shopping for a new microwave. A model was chosen off the currys website and reserved before I left.
Cue me arriving an hour and a half later. I walk up to the desk and announce I have a microwave reserved. I am then led to the microwave display shelf and asked to "point out" which one it is. The problem was the only microwave that looked anything similar to what we'd ordered was marked as a "conventional oven" for £40 more than the website advertised. It took 15 minutes of the salesdroid looking before the we finally worked out the shelf ticket was wrong, and we ended up having to match product numbers. Turns out the "conventional oven" was in fact a microwave and was the right item.
So, salesdroid now grabs said microwave and takes it to the till. The only problem is he bashes the box against a load of end-of-row displays before arriving at the till. Luckily the till applies the right price and of course they try and sell me a £15 warranty...
Next time, when I'm not in a hurry, the web or John Lewis will be getting my business...
We outfitted a 4 person office with FTTC and VoIP in August. Once the internet connection was up and running we were off. Call quality etc. perfectly reasonable.
We did have an outage recently (our supplier, Voipfone, had a major issue) but that was an hour or two. As you say, the real problem is that despite the lack of any technical cleverness, a standard phone line very rarely breaks.
"Or, more correctly, BT don't want the hassle of small businesses who want business SLAs for domestic prices, and will give BT too much grief when they don't get what they "expect"."
Business ADSL/FTTC costs are higher than domestic ones, and the SLA is usually next business day, so not overly onerous compared to the two business day Openreach now has to apply to domestic lines.
Next day and same day are more expensive still.
The leased line/superfast broadband "grants", as you say, paid a contribution towards the installation costs of a leased line. The problem is that while the installation costs are pretty considerable on leased lines, they're usually less than two months cost of rental, which as a rule is 10 times higher than FTTC.
Yep, Openreach's SLA is for voice and whatever you can throw down the line "as voice" (e.g. fax/moden). ADSL and ISDN are basically "best effort", and if they can't or won't supply them then its your problem.
This is why I tell people to report any slow broadband fault that's obviously a line fault issue (noises/crackles/no dial tone) as a voice fault and keep broadband out of it.
Its saddening, but reassuring, to hear from someone in the same ridiculous situation as us. For most offices under 30 users a business grade FTTC connection would be ample bandwidth. However telcos don't want to roll these out, much prefering long term contracted EFM/leased lines.
I've signed up to the Royal Mail's junk mail opt-out here: http://www.royalmail.com/personal/help-and-support/how-do-I-stop-receiving-any-leaflets-or-unaddressed-promotional-material
Its all a bit "get a from from the locked filing cabinet at the bottom of the dark stairs behind the sign that says 'Beware of the Leopard'" but its cut my junk mail to pretty much zero.
"We didn't have a choice, it was compulsory, something that has been changed after our test run was over."
I take it you're in the South of England? Sounds about right for round there.
Here in Wales you have three choices:
1: Standard, unmetered water on a fixed rate based on the Rateable Value of your house. About as accurate a way of judging water usage as an ouija board
2: "Assessed Rates". Your water usage is estimated on factors such as number of residents, number of bathrooms, dishwasher/waching machine and so on. Slightly cheaper than option 1
3: A meter. Compulsory in new houses, but you can get one fitted to any supply for free. If you find that you're paying more on a meter (not likely unless you're filling a swimming pool) then you can have it removed (I think there was a limit of a year or so). Anyone who buys the house after you must keep the meter and can't have it removed.
The meter in my house is a Denis Ferranti electromechanical job. It allows me to view my energy usage at a glance (through the rotating disc) and simply works.No ifs. No buts. No phoning home. My electricity supplier requests meter readings, and I supply them. Someone checks it physically about twice a year.
How on earth will a smart meter benefit me? My usage is allready minimal.
When you're over two miles from the nearest exchange (or even cabinet) 2mbit is good going, so anything that provides more bandwidth than that is a real bonus.
Plus of course there's the bonus of usable mobile reception when you're out and about (and for when Openreach take weeks/months to replace downed overhead lines)
There's nothing stopping anyone else installing a network (look at all the "self help" village fibre schemes popping up). As you say the problem is paying back the investment it takes to build the network out in the first place (see how long it took the cable companies to start turning a profit)
The problem is that a lot of the FTTC installation work is being subbed out to Openreach subcontractors (basically Kelly communications and M J Quinn). These contractors aren't on salary/hourly rates like proper openreach chaps, but are rather paid per connection/per job. Therefore if they can "sort of" get it working quickly they can do more jobs in a day and make more money.
The problem with this is that you end up with rushed jobs (can't find the address within 5mins? Cancel the job) Or customers being presuaded/misinformed to make a job easier (I'm sorry, I can only put the new master socket in the hall where the line comes in, you'll have to run your own extension to where you actually want it).
I've had my run-ins and issues with openreach guys in the past (no IT pro hasn't), but they're still a country mile better than the subbies.
Unfortunately niche shops like Radio Shack these days have to be very small and definitely online to thrive. The days of chain stores selling electronics are numbered due to the basic fact that you can have just about any component sent from anywhere in the world direct to your door for (relatively) little money.
That said, the last time I was in the Wrexham branch of Radio Shack it was for a reel of brown speaker cable that I needed that day. I've given up on Maplin (unless its an emergency) as their choice is limited.
Glossing over the fact that all of the aforementioned companies all work across borders already (apart from possibly talktalk) none of those problems are insurmountable and will be subject to debate in the case of a Yes vote.
As for prices, if they really were skewed so much by the cost of providing universal service to outlying regions of Scotland/Wales/NI/England then I'm looking forward to my reduced Licence fee/line rental/Mobile costs*
*reduction delivered by flying pig
Indeed, the Irish situation does give some ideas for how an Independent Scotland will develop
e.g. Currently BT (and its Irish counterpart) count calls from NI to the Republic and vice versa as national, rather than international calls.
IMO the interesting bits will be in the borderlands areas. Currently TV, Radio, Phone, Electriciy, Gas and Water are all supplied as though there were no border (e.g. the Caldbeck TV mast near Carlisle transmits both English and Scottish channels). How will these be divvied up?
Who currently charge landline calls from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland at the same rate as regular national calls.
Call me cynical, but these companies might be just a bit concerned that an independent Scottish comms regulator might just be given some teeth...
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