How many emails does it take to order a line from BT?

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

I hate it when people tease out a punchline, so I’ll tell you: it’s 122.

One hundred and twenty two emails, to get an order progressed with our national telecoms carrier. It almost beggars belief – but, for those of us who view telecoms connectivity as part of the very first stages of our WAN rollouts, it’s rapidly becoming the longest, most painful and least controllable part of any project. The reason, in this case, is because the order was placed with a BT Local Business (BTLB) unit.

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The question Ofcom won’t answer: is it safe to run an open Wi-Fi hotspot?

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

You may remember a few weeks ago, we reported on how Ofcom’s proposed code of conduct for dealing with illegal file-sharing contained a veiled warning to the providers of free or open Wi-Fi connections.

In a nutshell, anyone who provides an open Wi-Fi connection – be that a company with a free hotspot in their reception or a home user who decides to leave their router unprotected – will be held responsible if someone downloads copyrighted material on their connection. (Unless, bizarrely, they are a coffee shop or other business that offers Wi-Fi access in conjunction with other goods or services, in which cased they’re treated as an ISP).

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Is fibre broadband as expensive as BT makes out?

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

For many years now, BT has been claiming it simply cannot afford to deliver fibre broadband to large parts of the country. In 2008, the Broadband Stakeholder Group claimed it would cost £5.1 billion to deliver nationwide Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) – a figure that BT itself has repeated in public.

However, a press release issued by none other than BT today provides a fascinating insight into the economics of fibre broadband – and casts some doubt over the accuracy of those lofty figures.

In what BT describes as a “fibre triumph”, a local council in Kent has contributed to the cost of deploying fibre in the village of Iwade. According to BT, the council stumped up £13,000, which “unlocked” £62,000 of investment from the telco, meaning it cost a total of £75,000 to bring fibre to each of the village’s 1,350 premises.

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Brighton’s broadband battle: nimbyism or just common sense?

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The people of Brighton and Hove are lucky enough to get a little love from BT, with new infrastructure being rolled out for superfast broadband, but a few residents aren’t happy with the plans.

They’re not arguing against broadband, of course. They’re asking BT to reconsider the placement of a few of its super-cabinets, saying the 1.8m “monsters” will make the local streets ugly and disrupt residents.

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iPlate/Broadband Accelerator now free for BT customers

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

I first wrote about the BT iPlate (now renamed Broadband Accelerator) back in September 2008, and the blog post still gets thousands of hits per month from people desperately trying to eke more Mbits/sec out of their ADSL connections.

In case you’ve never heard of it, the Broadband Accelerator effectively cancels out potential interference from the now redundant bell wire, and can improve the speed of your connection by as much as 60% in our limited tests. It’ll only work on connections where the router is running off extension wiring, and even then it won’t work for everyone (indeed, some people have reported a drop in speed). And, yes, if you’re handy with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, you can achieve much the same effect by removing the BT socket faceplate and snipping the bell wire yourself.

However, as PC Pro blog reader ‘weeds season 4′ (don’t ask, just nod politely) pointed out this week, it’s probably not even worth the hassle if you’re a BT Total Broadband customer, as the company’s now giving away the easy-to-fit devices for free, bar £1.20 postage and packing. You can order one from the BT Broadband Accelerator website.

Let’s hope other ISPs follow suit.

Fibre broadband: why you might have to move your router

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Those salivating over the prospect of 40 or even 100Mbits/sec broadband arriving down a BT fibre connection sometime soon, be warned: installation might not be quite as straightforward as you’d hoped.

BT’s fibre lines use VDSL, rather than the ADSL used to power today’s broadband.  That means BT can’t just flick a switch in the exchange like it normally does with ADSL upgrades: it needs to come into your home and fit a new faceplate on your master telephone socket.

The bad news is that with this set-up you can’t run your router off extension wiring any more – it must be plugged into the master socket. That’s a bit of an issue if, as in many homes, your master socket is inconveniently located in the hallway or kitchen. Not many people want their router sat next to the coat stand, and it’s a pain in the buttocks if you prefer a wired connection from your router to devices such as your PC or games console.

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It’s time to redefine “broadband”

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

If I had a pound for every time BT and Ofcom had proudly boasted that 99% of the country has access to broadband, I’d be paying for a nationwide fibre network out of my pocket change.

The problem is it’s not true. At least not true in the sense of what you and I would call “broadband” in 2010 – a connection fast and reliable enough to play even standard definition shows from the BBC iPlayer, for instance, or swiftly download a self-assessment tax form.

BT and Ofcom use the same definition for “broadband” today as they did a decade ago, when we were gawping in awe at 512Kbits/sec lines – “always-on services, offering data rates of 128Kbits/sec and above”.

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Britain’s broadband leaders: arrogant and ambitionless

Friday, November 27th, 2009

How is Britain going to get the next-generation broadband network it desperately needs to compete in the modern world? That was the question posed to a panel of more than a dozen industry leaders and experts at the latest Westminster eForum, but convincing answers were desperately thin on the ground.

Instead of courage, creativity and innovation, the mood coming from Britain’s broadband leaders was complacency, resignation and a weary confession that we’re “still going round the same issues time and time again”.

The half of the country that’s connected to fibre provided by Virgin Media, BT or any number of local projects can almost certainly look forward to download speeds of 40Mbits/sec plus in the next few years. But what about the other half – the half living outside of the big cities that are already struggling on sub-standard connections?

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Outsourcing a telephone service

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

This year we outsourced our email service. We threw out our  internal mail servers (based on Postfix, Cyrus IMAP and MailScanner) and moved to Google Apps Premier. It has all worked very well and I am very happy with the decision — well worth the £33 per user per year.

What I want to do next year is get rid of the telephone exchange in my office. When we moved into our office we inherited a Panasonic switch and a collection of their feature phones. It hangs off a couple of ISDN-2 lines and works but costs more than it is worth. I feel that if in the 21st century I can out source my 20th century communication system I should be able to outsource my 19th century communication system as well.

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Britain’s scandalous upload speeds

Friday, July 31st, 2009

A letter to The Times this morning makes a spectacularly good point about British broadband. While the mainstream media has (rightly) been roasting the broadband providers for delivering only half the download speed advertised on the tin, “the real scandal is… that the upload speed may be only a thirtieth of this [headline download speed] figure”.

The Times’ correspondent is bang on the money. Ofcom’s broadband speed report claims that: “overall the average upload speed received by UK consumers is 0.43Mbits/sec, less than 10% of the average download speed”.

While that sounds a little sunnier than The Times man suggests, the report goes on to state that “even consumers on higher speed packages (20Mbits/sec cable and 16-24Mbits/sec DSL packages) receive an average of less than 0.7Mbit/s.”

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