Digg and Slashdot don’t really relate to people (just like many diggers and slashdotters!) It doesn’t matter how famous someone is, you’ll get a lot of comments along the lines of “Who really cares what Bob/Linus/Cory/etc.. had for breakfast”

I do, however, have a comment to make about some ISPs. A while back I chose to take a Masters in Networks and Distributed Systems and during our term we were visited by a leading telecoms provider and were told the realities of telecom/ISP pricing models. In a nutshell, your ISP can offer you close to 100% of it’s bandwidth capacity but chooses to only offer you 50% because MOST customers would be happy with 50% as they a) don’t need more bandwidth and b) couldn’t tell whether they were getting a good deal or not!

ISPs are running a business where they still believe they are offering a premium service. It’s up to us to convince governments that the world has moved on and the internet is no longer a “premium service”; it’s an essential form of communication as much as the telephone.

A

“Telecommunications

Landline telecoms, mobile telecoms and broadband are becoming increasingly competitive, with new products and lower prices for businesses and consumers.

Ofcom seeks to ensure that companies are able to compete fairly and that businesses and consumers benefit from the choice of a broad range of services. We take action to protect consumers from unfair practices;”

Regrettably, and interestingly, Virgin Media is not a member of Otelo (Office of the Telecommunications Ombudsman) which seems to have slightly more power and be more effective. Virgin Mobile, however, *is* a member…

I ditched them for many reasons, amongst them:

-broken transparent proxying
-random service outages in the middle of the night that lasted 2+ hours with no warning or subsequent explanation
-asymmetric upstream smaller than it should be to use the downstream properly
-consistent failure to reach claimed downstream speeds
-customer service from hell – even better with NTL
-dodgy pricing if you don’t take their TV service
-phone line not optional, and subject to frequent outages

I have ADSL from Zen now, works fine unless it rains for a few days thanks to my leaky BT line.

Virgin Media has a lot more in common with Virgin Trains than their planes.

I wonder if that argument will hold water. Let us know, and record your call for our convenience (and probable laughter)!

http://www.writetothem.com/
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

(bleh – that should probably all have gone in one post.)

I wonder if a workflow management tool would be handy for this process…

The main point of the letter was to announce to customers that they were going to increase people’s bills by £1 unless you signed up to their ‘e-billing’ service by June and no longer received paper bills. Getting your bill online was then referred to as a £1 ‘saving’ later in the same letter. I don’t know who is more stupid, them, or me for being a customer simply because they were cheap at the time.

I’m always surprised at the level of fury around this issue. Very popular data-heavy sites could reduce performance of all other sites if packets were treated on a first-come-first-serve basis. The companies are being site-egalitarian. They’re also ensuring that the sites putting the most pressure on the tubes are paying for the enormous infrastructure costs. Frankly I prefer that over my parents being charged even more when they don’t YouTube/BitTorrent/whatever.

The packages they offer are cheaper than Virgin (£18 for their “unlimited” package) and offer a lot faster connectivity (up to 24 meg downstream and 1.3 upstream for that package).

Haven’t used them yet, so they might still suck (although I’ve read some glowing reviews), but at least they’re still theoretically net neutral.

http://commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Statement&Statement_ID=40

Network operators want to charge us *three times* for our connections:

1. I pay for my broadband

2. Google pays for its broadband

3. My ISP charges Google to connect to my broadband

This is just rent-seeking, exploiting a regulatory monopoly — the public’s largesse — to pick the public’s pocket.

Imagine that you ran a successful independent pizzeria, Annoyedcapitalist’s American Style. When I call you up, BT says, “You’re ringing a basic-tier pizzeria. Please hold for 2 minutes, the time we delay calls to Annoyedcapitalist’s American Style because they haven’t paid us a ‘premium tier’ fee. Their line isn’t engaged — we just don’t route calls to them as efficiently as we might in order to maximize our revenue. In the meantime, if you’re hungry for pizza *now*, why not try Domino’s, who have paid for premium-rate call-routing.”

That’s a pretty sweet racket for BT — whose lines and right of ways have been paid for by the public, directly (through subsidy when they were a public entity) and indirectly (though free and low-cost rights-of-way) — but how is this good for the public, pizza, or capitalism?

If BT or Virgin want to run a purely capitalist enterprise, let them negotiate for every foot of sewer and every pole they string their wires through, and pay market rates for them. But if they’re going to get this stuff at public subsidy, they need to act in the public’s interest — or someone else should be given their wires and the mandate to run them.

You’re extremely welcome.
Here’s hoping you’re successful in freeing yourself from VM’s evil clutches. They don’t deserve your money (or anyone else’s IMHO).
I see Mr Stross is thinking about moving to Be. I’m just hoping they don’t succumb to the pressures that are currently screwing up the rest of the UK broadband industry. I fear that may be inevitable.
By the way, totally off topic but I’ve just started reading Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom and it’s blowing my mind. Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get around to looking at it. Do you mind me asking which of the many purchase options pays you the most? Amazon via affiliate link?

Cheers,

Andrew

Be are owned by O2, and I was with them for a few months and they were great, until O2 released their own branded service which was cheaper (esp. if you have an O2 mobile, £7.50 pm for 8 Mbps capped ADSL2+) and I moved over penaalty free :o). And yes, they are pretty good; my ADSL2+ connection gives me 500 Kbps downloads as oposed to the 220 Kbps I was getting on an equivalent ADSL (BT’s DSLMax) connection.

Of course, my mother and sister are both still stuck at 1 Mbps via cable, paying over twice as much as I do for ~4 Mbps, and unable to use any ADSL services as their phone lines (and tv) are operated by the same company. Oh yes, and that would be Virgin then. :oP

Now I am off to get my land line reconnected so I can get the current pick of the litter ADSL24 to be my new ISP.

Oddly when I told them why I was cancelling they wanted to know where I had read about the “total bollocks” statement.

I said Boing Boing, and the guy actually wrote it down to forward to the powers that be.

Completely ignoring that that the intervew was with Royal Television Society’s Television magazine.

Seems mad to be persuant of who is reporting something rather than which idiot CEO is shooting his mouth off.

The funny thing is, Cory’s views seem to mesh will with those of the SlashDot community, and as a journalist he writes articles with those values that people in the real world have a decent chance of reading.

Damn SlashDot internet elitists :(