Posts by JetSetJim

Considering it was rated "U", I doubt it did have them (or doubt they were spotted)

Re: Just goes to show...

> Now imagine you port three or four times (as I've done)... Call setup can take a couple of seconds. Why? When someone calls you, the caller's network has to handshake with each network in turn to reach the callee's current network.

I'd hope the s/w was written to first try the "last known good" operator, and not all of them each time. And it may fire them off in parallel.

Mostly, I'd expect the delays being caused by:

a) paging. If you're in spotty coverage, you may need to be paged multiple times for your phone to notice that you've got an incoming call. There are gaps of O(seconds) between the paging messages to give you time to respond on a potentially congested random access channel.

b) more paging (but less likely). If the network has lost track of you, it gradually expands its search within the network to find you - so the first time you're paged, it might only be on cells which aren't covering you

c) LTE, but not VOLTE. Here you have to get redirected down to a lower tech to establish your call. Not sure of the signalling flow, but would expect incremental delay here

d) network congestion (either end of the call). This may redirect the call setup to a different technology, too, which will incur delay in processing

Occasionally, you will also need to re-establish your ciphering/encryption keys to the network, which will incur further delays.

A lot of the delay is the air interface, which can take 10s-100s of milliseconds to transfer a small signalling packet. Once the data is on the wire, it whizzes along, and hardware processing/routing is in the micro/nano second scale (unless you're calling the moon).

I'd be pleased if GC were showing the big boys how to do it, and offering something better, but I'd have expected them to have the same problem of funding expensive infrastructure as everybody else.

Perhaps when the BDUK funding dries up, they'll stop digging trenches in roads, but I'd hope that the pricing model covers their operating costs and so existing customers will continue to be served well if they have to stop rolling out new coverage. I'm now paying less than what I was with BT in a previous property, for a service that is nigh on 100 times faster.

At best, in the FTTC-enabled places, you'll still pay more for less with BT.

1) that the business case doesn't really scale, and the economics mean they're only able to infill a few marginal notspots. I also note that they are using BDUK funding - does it stack up without subsidies?

My money's on number 3.

In the village I'm in, GC deployed FTTP just as OpenReach showed up to deploy FTTC - but the plans for the local exchange & cabinets had been known about for quite a while, so it's not news to GC that BT are upgrading cabinets in areas they are deploying into. BT will find it difficult to compete on bitrate, or even price. My money's on #2.

If they go the #1 route, then when the subsidy runs out either they raise prices significantly and customers leggit (although their T&Cs limit price increases to 2% above RPI), or they go to the wall, in which case #2 will happen.

Re: Another happy customer

I was rather impressed when they had an outage caused by their backbone supplier (Vodafone, IIRC), and they had the audacity to text me updates on progress before I'd even noticed. And then continued to give me updates, unsolicited, until it was fixed. The bare faced cheek of it all, I didn't even get the chance to take to Twitter to vent at them.

Re: and award for openess

> You can copy a patent for your personal use so long as you do not sell it.

Not sure that's entirely correct:

Making one unauthorized patented product for personal use could constitute patent infringement

http://ocpatentlawyer.com/3-basic-concepts-of-patent-infringement/

Re: Finns gonna pay the fat redundancy cheques again

> Follow the rules to the letter and it should go smoothly.

Hmm - while I agree with the sentiment, in practice, and in France, things go differently. ALU itself tried to make redundancies in France within the last 5 years - basically the second you announce it the whole company (in France), excluding senior management, goes on strike, and that impacts business operations significantly. Net result is that ALU had to dramatically scale back the cuts, and then dragged some offshore jobs into France to partially offset this (and this included the closure of some UK facilities). It's difficult to see how this could go smoothly.

Re: Finns gonna pay the fat redundancy cheques again

They've also done this before with the Wireless division of Motorola back in 2010-11. Lots of cost savings to be had in rationalising product lines, but a big one-off cost of ensuring interoperability for when they have to swap out boxes in live networks, and then "training up" the new support operations in the low cost centres before canning the old ones.

The main savings are probably going to be in the manufacturing area when they get around to combining all the duplicate product lines (if they can). It will be interesting to see which boxes they EOL and what impact that has on existing contracts.

The USA has a big install base of ALU LTE, so that's going to need to be supported & maintained for a few years

Re: Time to ring up Sky Broadband....

Hell, publish the list and lets see what Rupe thinks is too naughty for us proles. I doubt any conflict of interest will show up at all, considering his extensive media interests...