Re: What has the EU do do with it anyway?

"a British service available only to some of the people who live in Britain. "

Re: Only three infrastructure providers in the UK

I agree with your logic, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating for those of us whom BT simply refuses to provide a service to.

This is supposed to be critical national infrastructure, more and more council and government services are being moved online, BT has the advantage of being a monopoly that is fully protected against failure by the Government (no way can BT be allowed to go under) and yet at a whim they can deny anyone access to this national infrastructure.

There is no responsibility on them to provide universal access, and that is ridiculous.

Re: Easy answer?

I think you'll find its the accountants and the execs who gets obscene bonuses who are driving the policy of running the old copper network into the ground. R&D have done a fine job of producing a product, the rest of the company just refuses to make it available because that would hit short term profits. Best to eke every last ounce of profit out of the old crumbling system. Why not if you are a monopoly - the majority of the population has no choice but to use it?

Re: re: and best keep professional relationships professional.

"It's so rare to meet a contractor who doesn't think they are "better" than permanent staff because of how they choose to work."

I'm a contractor. I've got to say though that a greater proportion of the contractors that I meet are shite than the permies. They bullshit their way into contracts and by the time everyone realises they're shite they've got 3 months money in their pocket.

IT and Networking has a high proportion of busllshit merchants.

Re: Holy cow get a life!

@ meanioni

"all from evil megacorps"

I'm fascinated, which evil megacorp is Linux from then? And when will they be knocking on my door demanding payment for their product?

Re: What happend to the company providing kit to do their dirty work with?

With BYOD this could have all sorts of implications for other workers.

That is a fair point. It would be so much better if the IT guys just stopped keeping the good shit for themselves.

Re: What happend to the company providing kit to do their dirty work with?

"Either they wanted to show off their new shiny in the office or they wanted the office to buy their new shiny for them."

No, what we want is a machine that is spec'd to allow us to actually do our jobs. Without crashing, without the sync hanging, without the hard-disk paging constantly etc etc.

The problem with IT is they spec themselve the latest and greatest kit blowing all the budget on themselves, then foist junk onto everyone else, as if it wasn't everyone else that kept them in a job!

Re: What happend to the company providing kit to do their dirty work with?

@ Jason 7,

Every single member of the department I am currently contracting in owns a laptop that is at least twice as well spec's as the Toys R Us "my first computer"s that the IT bods allow us. Mine must be 4 times as good and mines isn't even the best!

Re: HS2?

Because its a vanity project, a distraction from the fact that the rest of the network is rotting away. They can't afford not to do it because its the only evidence they are doing anything constructive about the problem at all.

Re: What happend to the company providing kit to do their dirty work with?

Mmmmm, the downside to this is that you get supplied the cheapest crap possible with which to do your work. It will be slow, so loaded down with "management" services that you can just about run notepad if your lucky, takes an age to boot, is tied to the network with some desperately unreliable synchronization software that means you have to reboot your hideously slow to boot POC just to get undocked.

All the while the IT desk pilots have supplied themselves with the latest all singing all dancing hardware because they have spreadsheets to full in.

I'd pay to use my own laptop just to remove the stress related to struggling along with a POC laptop. I could run a corporate image as a VM and it would still be twice as fast as the poxy abacus they gave me.

I'm field based and work mostly on customer sites and this is universal in my experience. IT bods and managers get the decent kit because they don't need it. Power users get crap.

Re: Lucky?

+1 for Synergy. Its a superb bit of kit. Not the most intuitive to setup, but not really that hard. Free, Open Source and cross-platform. I mean what else do you want?

Re: For all the bitching and whining at BT...

Not around my way they're not.

Re: Welcome to this century, BT

We'll not have any of your foreign type competion here! This is a local country, for local people! I'll have you know that we jolly well enjoy being shafted by our monopoly communications provider, it's the British way dontcher know. Must protect the precious things of the telecoms network.....

Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

Time for some fact busting.

- ?

Bandwidth to exchange is a non issue,

- so the characteristic impedence of the line has no effect on sync speed of the ADSL modem? Sync speed is an absolute bandwidth limit. Weather you are rate-limited internally to the ISP is dependant on your connection speed. If you are connected at 1M, and a great many people are, you will likely never see a rate-limit as there would be no point.

you are on your own copper pair to the exchange (or to cab for FTTC).

- a large proportion of the country is on aluminium, a piss poor conductor compared to copper but installed when the GPO sold the copper lines after the war.

There is no contention or oversubscribing here and your connection speed is entirely dependant on the copper quality ( or aluminium) and distance from cab/exchange,

- and joint quality and weather shielding quality, and modem compatibility and the quality of the cable run i.e. how close to inteference etc.

BT contention only comes into it on the handover from the exchange to the ISP own network. (Bt broadband itself does not have its own network and instead throws its customers from the RAS server straight out into the core BT network.)

Re: If we're going to hand taxpayers money to natural monopolies

It's called a loss leader. BT can afford to bid low to keep its monopoly secure because of the massive profits it screws out of us by being a monopoly. Its self sustaining.

Re: Begrudger

"If they're in the business of delivering broadband"

What they are in the business of is making profit. They have no interest in providing a uniform country wide service, they have no interest in what benefits the community. If its profitable to provide you a service you can have it, of not, screw you.

The bigger question is why the Goverment gives us all this talk about how important broadband it, how it will benefit the economy/community and yet leaves the whole deal in the hands of a monopoly that has proven over the decades that it gives not one toss about anything other than filling its coffers.

Re: Indeed

Thats the way the great BT con works.

"If you join a decent ISP you will get a constant speed 24/7."

Oh dear. Do you need someone to explain the difference between an ISP and a carrier to you?

For the majority of the country BT is the only carrier. It matters not a jot what ISP you sign up with, your physical ADSL connection is a BT connection, on BT kit. This is where the problem lies with most broadband. The 1950's physical infrastructure that BT is still milking as it slowly rusts into ground.

Re: Time for billing chnages

"BT is not a charity. Sorry."

Indeed, they are in fact a monopoly, and there is the problem right there.

Re: Lies and statistics

Um, no. Because for every 100 customers you upgradefrom 1M to 10MB you could just install one Gigabit Internet customer. You get the same average speed improvement for 100th of the man hours.

BT know this. They know they are judged on the average speed, and installing a few very high speed lines gets a much cheaper boost in the averages.

Its just a scam.

I can only say that in my experience that isn't true. Android owners seem to have specific reasons for not wanting an iPhone. iPhone users tend to just look at you as if you had asked a blindingly stupid question.

Re: A few questions

Can someone explain why a typical household would need 100Mb/1Gb Internet access? ('Bragging rights' is not a reason.)

Indeed I can. 10M should be plenty for everyone, but providing 10M to everyone is expensive and affects profits. BT have spotted that the countrys broadband network is judged by average speed, so -

Assuming that you have 20 million households connected at 2M thats an average of 2M. If you upgrade half of those to 10M you get an average of 6M for the cost of installing 10 million circuits.

However you can achieve the SAME 6M average by upgrading just 80000 households to gigabit.

So pick a few convenient cities where customers are densly packed, stick in fibre and voila a national average raised from 2M to 6M for a tenth of the cost. Wow, what a marvelous achievement! Except what it is is a marvelous bit of misdirection allowing BT to look like they are investing while actually continuing to make massive profits running the rest of the old network into the ground.

Re: You do have a choice...

Bollocks, BT is a monopoly provider for the majority of the country. Sure I can change ISP, but the damp piece of string that is my broadband can only be BT, because BT made damn sure that no competitor could afford to get in the exchange. If you think there is competition in this country then you live in a city.

Re: @JDX

Completely agree, that's why I use linux. Now don't let yourself down by trying to explain why Apple is the ONLY MS alternative, you were doing so well.

Re: @JDX

Interesting that you should choose B&O, another shining example of style over substance.

Re: Confused....

Why change a winning formula?

Re: @Pete : Divide and conquer

I've done this any number of time on any number of distros. My 14 year old son worked that one out after 5 mins. Clearly not as intelligent as you were led to believe.

Plus any complication around libdvdcss is imposed on distro's by the proprietary nature of the code.

So bad example.

Next?

The alternative argument is that if you can't just copy something you waste endless man hours reinventing the wheel.

Re: The Distinction....

Wrong wrong, wrongity wrong wrong.

The computer / Excel analog is entirely correct.

Re: The Distinction....

Yes, it really would. The Internet is a physical network and all the logical structures related to packet layer communications. The World Wide Web is an application. As is DNS, FTP, Gopher, email etc. The two are entirely distinct.

Its really like saying that the telephone network is the same as the emergency services because you access the emergency service via the telephone network.

Derp.

Re: Pedant

It's stateful at Layer4 perhaps, but as already pointed out to be "logged on" implies authentication of a user. So he was talking about stateful at the application layer, which HTTP is not. When you provide user specific authetication you are considered to be "logged on"

Re: AC @M Gale.... 21:12

You realise that all you are doing is confirming to everyone the growing stereotype that Apple fanboys are complete arseholes?

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Pratt.

Re: Gabe!

A statement only an idiot could make, grow up and get out of the 1990s will you?

You seem to be mis informed about a few things, If people were able to get Sky or Virgin do you think they'd be complaining here? In the vast majority of the country, and I'm talking geographically here not population coverage, BT is a monopoly. You CANNOT get these other services. And most people I talk to DON'T want 100MB, 1MB would be a start!

BT have made massive profits, historically, by charging people to use the network they inherited cheap while slowly letting it run into the ground. In the meantime they have cherry picked to make more profit and completely ignored the fact that they are supposed to running a national infrasctructure.

They choose not to provide service where there is no profit in it, but then use every underhand tactic in the book to make sure no competition can possibly get established in an area that they have allready decided not to provide service to.

BT is a national disgrace and the reason that the UK has a third world telecommunications network. Competetive market my arse!