Can’t even get connected to family (VoIP no longer working)

HIS is not a worthless rant and it is not written in a rush. Far from it. It has taken me three days to research and prepare the text. I didn’t want to write this, but circumstances — however unfortunate — rendered me an unwitting messenger. This post is based on my observations, my technical analysis, and many conversations with half a dozen BT employees and various people I know who are intimately familiar with such issues. In a sense, this post is a joint effort of many voices, some of which are insiders.

Let’s start with the basics.

My ISP issues, with BT, started on Monday, i.e. more than 2 days ago. BT is the ‘former’ monopoly that still controls Openreach and many other entities behind the scenes (yesterday they tried to pretend to have nothing to do with Openreach, but that’s just laughable). An hour ago I spoke to someone from a government-commissioned ‘independent’ outpost, but he admitted to me that he’s in fact a BT employee, salaried by BT. We’ll come back to that in a moment. The issues are not 100% persistent, but they’ve generally persisted since the start of the week, just before the commencement of another round of lock-downs in England. It ‘felt’ like the issues were resolved last night, at least temporarily around midnight, but they are back. These issues keep coming back, not just during business hours. The issues are certainly not at our end (we’ve tested many devices). After some discussion I was given a citation from Ofcom and advised to tell BT that I’m reporting them to Ofcom for throttling (especially upload speeds). I spent literally hours arguing with them about it; about ten times they repeated the line that “there’s nothing we can do” and/or “we cannot guarantee upload speeds” (but at present the upload speeds are about as appalling as 1990s modems). Ofcom’s rules and regulations were partly confirmed, albeit hesitantly, by BT management higher up. Ofcom talks of 1Mbit/sec upload threshold and speaks of the possibility that they must upgrade the customer if that cannot be met. This worries BT. They keep saying that they have no control over these speeds, or that it’s automated, but it’s a semi-truth (it’s their equipment, they can change the configurations if they really wish to). At one point I decided to demand a full refund for this month and cancel my contract. We cannot even make VoIP calls, we’ve had to use the landline (it works fine, which means that TCP/IP packets are being capped at the exchange or elsewhere), and paying 40 pounds a month for a connection you cannot make calls on seems rather unreasonable.

I’ve spent many hours studying this. I experimented with upstream connections to datacentres in London and in the US. It’s not a cross-Atlantic issue. After spending about 3 hours on the phone (half the time speaking to BT managers) and doing lots of technical work I came to the conclusion that BT simply cannot meet the needs of users. They’re well over capacity, especially for upstream links. They won’t ever admit this, but they don’t deny it either (they dodge the question or refuse to answer it) as that can harm consumer confidence. They seem to have under-provisioned, having not predicted a crisis like COVID-19 (with people talking over the Net instead of inside the office in a face-to-face fashion or over intranet).

Suffice to say, the media is, as usual, sleeping at the wheel and not doing its job investigating and scrutinising these days. BT is very sensitive about the whole thing. I’ve noticed that they’re increasingly evasive as they might fear some sort of class action or mass cancellation, based on the premise they’re unable to deliver proper service.

Surprisingly enough, as things heated up a bit, at one point a manager told me I’m not allowed to record the call (BT does record everything). I did not actually record any of the calls, but it shows a degree of fear or paranoia if they threaten people who might simply record what they’re saying.

All in all, I had to spend like an hour and a half with cancellation without being allowed to cancel. They stonewall and create diversions. They keep asking me the same details over and over again, merely to confirm (even to the same people) that I am who I claim to be (but they’re BT, they can see the origin of the call regardless). Odd, I think…

Today I spent two hours on the phone, leaving me frozen (almost literally) on the line for as much as 10 minutes (at the times while they escalate internally, taking so long as if they panic about bad publicity).

I was escalated about three level upwards (though they all seem to work from home, one person said he was based in Warrington, not far from here). I asked them countless times about traffic shaping/capping/throttling. I spoke about bottlenecks, but they don’t wish to talk about any of those things. It’s like the elephant in the room. At one point I brought up Phorm and DPI; they knew what I was alluding to, but as usual… no comment. They don’t wish to discuss what happens with data and TCP/IP switching.

Monday morning this chaos began. I’ve barely been able to upload files, we cannot make calls over the Internet and we get disconnected each time we phone them despite asking them not to do this (they did this twice in a row, ignoring my request).

I told them that since both my wife and I work on research projects (related to COVID-19 as well) through the NHS we’re sort of “essential” workers. I told them that, especially at times like these, homes aren’t just homes, they’re offices. We work remotely. We work on important things and the connection issues cause severe problems to people and even put jobs at risk. People cannot work from elsewhere; it’s ILLEGAL.

I spoke to them for over an hour yesterday (I managed to convince them to open a formal complaint — an option that I have but they try hard to hide). Today we spoke for 2 hours. It was hell, for both sides.

They keep refusing to answer simple questions. I asked them about capacity issues and they refuse to comment. It’s not that they don’t understand the terminology, they just try to shift the conversation back to their “script”…

It’s exhausting. The conversations go almost nowhere. They’re talking like robots speaking from manuals (they’re all based in the UK by the way, they’re not low-skilled workers). I’ve just spent nearly two hours battling with their managers over the phone (politely); they’re making it almost impossible to cancel an account after repeatedly failing their customers.

At one point, after insistence from me and obstruction from them, they passed me on to cancellations (typically called “customer retention” but BT has called that “loyalty”). So awful it was. They never let the caller even get through to actually cancelling. It’s like those epic videos in the US where you see people trying to cancel their contract with ISPs or AOL. The people are trained to mislead, obstruct, divert…

Eventually I spoke to a contingency — an agency or office set up by a government charter (but manned by people employed by BT in Newcastle). They suggested getting a G4 hub, but they did not specify a cost. For something like fibre to the home they speak of costs like 3,500 pounds. So that’s hardly a workable fallback.

All in all, I’ve reached the conclusion that BT isn’t being honest about what’s going on. They could, instead, just acknowledge that due to lack of capacity they’re throttling people’s connections (here if not elsewhere), then apologise. But instead it boils down to complainant shaming and leaned helplessness. They shamelessly pretend that this has nothing to do with them. Like with many other things during the crisis (pandemic), extreme measures are taken to deny people their rights (as humans, customers, labourers) and we’re suppose to just accept it. ?

MY decade at Twitter was last year. I joined it after I had posted a bunch of stuff in identi.ca, then decided to post copies in Twitter. 750k tweets later identi.ca is almost defunct and I primarily post in Pleroma and JoinDiaspora. Does that mean that I completely ignore Twitter? Not just yet. I check replies I receive there about once a day.

Twitter isn’t a good site, but sadly that’s where many people still are…

“Windows 98 should have been released for free on Jan. 1, 1996 and titled Windows 95.1. If this were Hollywood, then Windows 98 would be the equivalent of ‘Heaven’s Gate’, ‘Waterworld’ and ‘Godzilla’ rolled into one. A huge, overhyped, bloated, embarrassment.”

–Jesse Berst, ZDNet editor

MY GENERATION (I’m 37) grew up on DOS. Not necessarily Microsoft DOS, either. Just DOS. As a kid I used to work from the command line. We, as kids, taught one another new tricks; sometimes an adult would visit to teach us things and copy some programs for us (floppy disks with compressed archives). Various utilities like RAR were useful. Sometimes an infection (malicious program) needed to be removed. That was before the days of Windows 3.x — the days we used ncurses-type interfaces to type documents and send these to printers. Later on I did some programming with batch files and at around age 15 I started with Pascal (quite popular at the time owing to simplicity and relative elegance).

I mostly missed the BBS generation (some friends of mine used it; they’d copy for us files they got from there). When bulletin board systems were still popular many computers did not even have modems (few of my classmates had them, usually because of lack of a technical parent, and only one of them was a GNU/Linux user in the mid/late nineties). I think I got my first modem when I was 14 and IRC was probably the first thing I used “on-line”. After Windows 95, which many people used at that time, I bought my last Windows laptop. Actually, my father bought it. He used it and then passed it to me. It had only 32 MB of RAM and Windows 98. I carried it around and used it in university as an undergraduate student (at the faculty I used GNU/Linux at the time). It retired years later and I’ve not bothered with Windows since then. I wrote a great deal about it in USENET at the time. Memories from these days are mostly gone by now; I barely ever touch Windows and when I do it’s over Remote Desktop, typically to access a client’s network, e.g. to run PuTTY from a remote system. That happens about once a month (patching Debian GNU/Linux servers).

Was Windows 98 a decent operating system? No, it was unreliable, but at least it ran on modest hardware without much RAM. I ran Firefox on it, with a total system capacity of something from the mid-nineties (~400MegaHertZ CPU, 32 MB of RAM). That was before Microsoft added back doors to Windows (this was reportedly done in 1999), before the bloat of NT and before DRM (Vista).

With 3 weeks left before the end of this year (and this decade) I remember not so fondly the 90s, back when I used Windows. In 2000 I moved to GNU/Linux, helped by a Finnish friend, an exchange student at the university. In a sense, next year I become a 20-year GNU/Linux user.

EMEMBER the minimalism of early/earlier Twitter? Here it is in 2009; Notice how in 2014 it’s already bloated; nowadays it takes up gigabytes of RAM — all this to read SMS-sized blurbs and replies to them. I have to restart my browser just to read notifications. I’ve had enough!

Twitter, the Saudi-owned (partly at least) social control media company (i.e. censorship, a filter of communications whose owners determine what people or speech are permissible), is finished. It’s dying anyway.

Weeks ago it banned, with neither warning nor notice (let alone an explanation), the account that supports Julian Assange. It was terminated despite being professional and polite. It was associated with some very high-profile people, including Julian Assange’s family. Weeks later the account was reinstated (after huge backlash), but other accounts associated with this one remain banned. Everything they’ve ever published got deleted for — possibly at least — being ‘inconvenient’ to the site’s owners, i.e. shareholders who subsidise this company’s losses.

In order to reduce these losses or turn up some temporary profits (for the first time ever!) a year ago Twitter cut off third-party applications. It killed APIs in an effort to impose its surveillance malware (‘app’) on all users and each page was greeted with a pop-up pushing this malicious ‘app’.

Moments ago the site started imposing its utterly disgusting mobile UI on all visitors, even those who do not use a mobile device. This, to me, was the final straw.

I will still have stuff copied onto Twitter (through Diaspora), I will occasionally check replies (perhaps once a day), but for all practical purposes my presence in Twitter will remain mostly a phantom. Later this week I will have posted my 666,666^th tweet (special number), but before I get to it I sort of ‘quit’ Twitter. Knowing that many people have no account other than in Twitter I will keep sending copies of my dents/diaspora posts/Pleroma posts/toots into it.

Twitter as a company deserves to collapse. Like Facebook, it has artificially inflated the number of users; it lies to advertisers and gives a false impression/perception of scale. I predict that Twitter won’t last more than a decade (from now). It had lost billions before it began ‘squeezing the goose’ and now the goose is in its deathbed. RIP, Twitter. I won’t miss you when you’re gone.

emember NewsForge? Or Geeknet? Yes, once upon a time Linux.com was a site for geeks; under the Linux Foundation’s ownership it gradually became a site for large corporations, where they could buy puff pieces and interviews (agreed upon in advance, as covered in Techrights). But among those puff pieces and ads one could at least find some journalism.

I’m sad to see, 2 months down the line, that Linux.com is practically dead. Nothing new is being added to it. It’s now a fossil. Eternally? The Foundation has said not a single word about it. So much for openness and transparency, eh?

LANNED for next Friday is a little local party to celebrate the Tux Machines birthday, which is a special one because it’s fifteenth. It’s hard to believe the site started its 16^th year earlier this month.

The party will mostly involve some local/personal friends of ours, but if you live near Manchester and wish to join, send me an E-mail.

EVERAL months ago Gab banned my account which posted GNU/Linux news. It had many followers and said nothing provocative. No explanation was ever given for the ban. Nothing. Not even when asked. Repeatedly. They just zapped the account without warning. Then they pretended nothing happened, hoping nobody would notice that Gab is in fact a censorship platform.

Recently the site was offline for a week after a terror attack. The terrorist maintained a Gab account. Gab kept telling the media that it’s really just standing up for “free speech”, but that’s obviously a lie. It’s a fat lie. Torba is a liar and he knows he’s a liar. He’s just trying to profit from hate.

The site came back online just over a day ago and within a day my personal account got banned. I had many followers (about a thousand) and tens of thousands of gabs (mostly left-leaning and technical stuff). Did I post something obscene or offensive? No. Just some left-leaning news.

One therefore must conclude that the site isn’t just an echo chamber for radicals and sometimes terrorists. It’s a site that actively protects radicals (and sometimes terrorists) from opposing views. And that’s dangerous. Very dangerous. Gab is quickly becoming another Daily Stormer and at one point I received almost a dozen death threats and death wishes in just one day.

Since Gab has proven itself to be a censorship site (even twice in my case alone), it does not have the right to bemoan censorship. If the site is shut down forcibly and permanently, so be it. They cannot complain (calling it “censorship”) because gross censorship is exactly what these people do and we know in whose favour: violent, racist radicals. If you’re not one of them, then that might upset them and sooner or later you might get banned. Permanently.