Posts by feanor

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: 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.

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: @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: 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?

Re: The Distinction....

Wrong wrong, wrongity wrong wrong.

The computer / Excel analog is entirely correct.

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!

BT is bad. I've been asking them for a line for 10 years and nothing has happened. I'm stuck at 1mbps and expect it to be that way pretty much forever. So your point was?

Re: Virgin Media doesn't have boxes everywhere, why does BT need them?

"BT have to provide a universal service."

They have to provide a universal service. Apparently the small print didn't specify that it couldn't be a universally rubbish service!

No, look, please try to pay attention. Accident rates are NOT proportional to speed. The effects of the accident may be but not the rate at which they occur.

Re: So ripping off MINIX and giving it away for free counts as "innovation" now?

Wow. Sore loser is sore....