s we have seen here before, when BT messes things up, it messes up royally [1, 2, 3]. Yesterday was another reminder of this. At 9AM, without any warning or notification, the connection went down, apparently affecting entire large areas in Manchester and perhaps Bolton. The helpline which is only ‘manned’ by a recorded message preferred to draw attention to some Yahoo! (E-mail access) problem and there was no estimated time for return of service (for those who may resort to contingencies). The less advertised number through which one can speak to an actual person later contradicted the automated messages, which preferred to pretend the connection problems were over long before these were over (the connection was said to have been resorted at 3PM). The actual person whom I eventually spoke to (based on India) was very kind, but he used the same strategy of emphasising that the phone line is fine (while knowing perfectly well that the problem is the Internet connection, not the landline). It was very hard to actually ‘squeeze out’ information and empty reassurances from the rep I spoke to. Why not be honest and forthcoming? BT was seemingly reluctant to even acknowledge that this was a large-scale failure at its end. Does reputation or the customer come first?

Eventually, 14 hours after the disruption had occurred, the connectivity was suddenly restored, no sooner than 11PM. So en entire day from morning to night was essentially without Internet and with very unreliable estimates of recovery time (if any estimates at all).

Now good, BT, not good…Many people’s job these days depend on the Internet. If you cannot provide an Internet connection for an entire day, then please at least provide reasonable status messages and estimates for restoration of service. If one expects the connection to be down for so long, a dongle or another PC (elsewhere) can be approached and used.

hat happens when the network does not function or functions very poorly? What happens when the Internet is altogether down or goes on and off almost indefinitely/infinitely? The problem need not apply to the Internet connection as a whole; it might for example be a DNS server, a particular Web site which is necessary to access, a server at work, or even a message/call which is anticipated. When there is no estimated time for service restoration one can just assume that normality will resume shortly. Only in retrospect can one decide that it would have been better to just walk away and do something else (even offline) until the problems are resolved for good.

Before going any further, it is worth naming the motivation for this post. Yes, it’s BT again. All morning so far their service has been awful; sometimes the connection goes down altogether, requiring reconnection to SSH servers (which takes a lot of time). It also leads to gaps in IRC logging, makes Web surfing a real nightmare, and so on. Connection persistence is crucial here. The rest of the time there seems to be a capacity issue, so any bandwidth-heavy process is out of the question. To be fair to BT, for the past couple of months their service has been perfect, after a rather rocky first month (weekly unscheduled hangups) and many problems with setup (explained in length in this blog).

In any event, the point worth making is that in many circumstances in life there arises a dilemma where one must decide whether to walk away from the temporary problems early on (when they first occur) or wait patiently for a while and if so, how long for. The correct thing to do — if there is at all such a thing as “correct” in this context — very much depends on the knowns and unknowns; it may also rely on communication with people who are more familiar with the problems encountered (e.g. those in the back rooms). The network of people can better assess whether to plan for a contingency offline or just carry on waiting. This is why it’s a sort of network uncertainty problem. There is never a solid solution to it and the hours lost due to downtime can only ever be minimised by becoming better informed and also preparing alternative activities to pass time (I escaped the bad connection to write this post from the City Centre).

couple of months ago Virgin Trains made an error which left me with an invalid couple of tickets. I had to purchase 2 new tickets in London and be late as a result, too. At the end of the day I approached Virgin, attempting of course to resolve this over the counter, instead being referred to customer support (by snail mail to Birmingham). After carefully writing an explanation and enclosing the unusable tickets I have been writing a couple of letters to them, passing them by post at the expense of my time and patience. They later ended up sending me a survey to provide feedback on customer support (which I did send them) rather than actually write back about the case of their mishandling. The post never came from them.

To cut this long story short, this whole experience was money down the drain and then a lot of time down the drain. I probably won’t buy tickets from Virgin Trains again. It’s not even worth losing hours like this, either in vain (like in my case) or where the outcome might be rightful compensation. I can only advise others to avoid Virgin Trains as well. After they mess up, their Customer ‘Support’ team failed to pick up the pieces. It’s a recipe for unhappy clients.

obile phones are a marvel of innovation and their small size is a testament to human achievement. But mobile phones as mere phones go a long way back, decades in fact. Their functionality today has hardly changed when it comes to core objectives like making and receiving calls. So how have people come to the point of treating them as accessories and status items in our increasingly superficial social system? Why are my colleagues advertising a phone brand in all their E-mails for example? Why are people without a phone (or a Facebook account for that matter) frowned upon? Must everyone be semi-detached to a phone? Is it a status symbol? Is that how it’s marketed? Wrist watches were like that sometimes, e.g. Rolex.

I personally no longer carry a mobile phone (or cellphone to Americans) for reasons that I explained a lot of times in many different places. I do, however, carry a PDA (it was even used to compose this post with a full-sized keyboard). It’s not something that I love to talk about as it is controversial and my view is an unpopular views. Usually I avoid naming the reasons in order to avoid a pointless conversation. But here is an attempt to cohesively explain some of the factors that led me to giving up mobile phones in 2003. I am unlikely to get one again as it is like an addiction in the sense that once one is purchased, it is hard to get out of the cycle, due to people expecting your number to work, the phone to always be switched on, and for you to be near a computer even when you are not. Moreover, there are strings like contracts, which give nothing other than more complications and paperwork. Getting a mobile phone is easy, but getting out/rid of it is the hard part, as I learned 8 years ago. Among the factors that cause discomfort, as mentioned earlier in other contexts, is the associated complications that resemble getting utility bills and having to challenge mistakes, set up direct debit, check billing addresses, handle repairs, etc. Another of course is the inability to distance oneself from work. People expect people with a mobile phone to be accessible anywhere, at any time. It is unreasonable given that the phone owner might not have Internet access at every moment of the day, which is crucial for some people to operate properly in a professional way. But then there are also the elephants in the room, which make people moody or confrontational when the subject is brought up. There are primarily two such elephants; the first is privacy and the second is health. Enough said, no? The industry which profits from mobile phone extravaganza funds research to deny the health implications of associated radiation, whereas almost any study not funded by those entities shows the opposite. It’s like the tobacco lobby back in the days. Please don’t attack the messengers just because the truth is not convenient. Also, do not be selective so as to fit one’s belief of choice; it’s like faith which overcomes reasoning, even confirmation bias. Regarding privacy, more people appear to be catching up with the problem, especially recently. Using triangulation it has always been possible for carriers to determine the position of the callers (geographically) and as time goes on and antennas density increases, the identification is further refined. In the past it was not as bad as before because carriers were not legally required and retain this information for the government. They are now, as friends who work for British telcos tell me with complete confidence. This is a serious step back which shows how hostile phones are becoming. This data is not there for the user, so it can mostly be used against the user. It never goes away, either. To make matters worse, even makers of the operating systems of the phone are now probing for one’s location. How can that ever be useful to the user? Marketing? To spin this attack on privacy as something positive people might say that it’s for one’s safety, in case someone gets lost/injured/abducted and becomes “missing”. In practice, however, It is rarely the case that the phone becomes a saviour unless a call is being made. So the privacy part of it (location recording with a long trail of history) is an entirely invalid point. Why retention?

The subject of privacy is better understood by those whose activities might be seen as subversive by some who themselves subvert society. The vigilant ones amongst us understand that privacy protects us from those who have too much power.

The one major circumstance where having a mobile phone would be invaluable is when trying to coordinate a meeting with someone out in town or some streets where a land line is not easily accessible. But that someone would have to be unreliable as people could arrange meetings and avoid being late long before mobile phones. Today’s generation got accustomed to the idea of using a phone to justify being late (people are still late, but they get reassurances and estimated times of arrival, which is not ideal either). If the train system was run like this, there would be considerable trouble.

The matter of fact is, a lot of people these days use their mobile phones for purposes they were not designed for, e.g. loud conversations about what’s available for lunch. It becomes an attention-seeking apparatus and less of a tool of necessity. People give away phones to workers or family in order for them to be contacted rather than in order for them to make contact and if they cannot be reached there is an unsubstantiated fear and paranoia. Rather than quell and suppress uncertainty (when someone can or cannot be reached) it just causes more anxiety.

Do you still carry a mobile phone? And if so, have you tried carrying none for a whole month as an experiment? It would probably not be an ideal experiment due to the tie-up or addiction mentioned at the start of this post. It’s a cyclic trap, more so than addictive computer games. Social interaction manifests peer pressure. The truth is, even without a mobile phone people can do all the same things; there are substitutes for everything and nothing ever rings to interrupt an epiphany.

Being a Bastards Telecom customer means a lot of things, some of which include:

• Waking up every morning for two weeks only to test a phone line
• Being told by a Bastards Telecom agent that it’s OK if the line is not working, it’s just part of how it’s supposed to work (it’s not, they made an error and then arrogantly disregarded my advice)
• Taking two complete days off work to wait by the intercom from 7AM to 6PM, thinking that perhaps within a minute the delivery person will arrive (but in vain, surely)
• Waiting on line (in a queue) for one hour to reach an actual person. This is not like holding the phone for one hour knowing that after one hour someone will answer it. This is a case of a one-hour anticipation for answer on the other line (you don’t want to miss an actual real person who doesn’t just ask you to enter digits after waiting for half an hour).
• Not doing proper exercise for a week, just making phonecalls at the gym and waiting for calls back (nearly having to apologise for being a polite (but mistreated) customer
• Having to travel for half an hour just to get to a phone with a working line so that about 20 phonecalls (like the above) can be made
• Having to ask friends and business ownerz for an apology for using the line for hours and hours, draining battery, taking up their time, and costing them telephone charges
• Not being able to get in touch with friends (except using slow medium like E-mail)
• Having your friends receive unwanted and unexpected phonecalls from Bastards Telecom, which somehow decided one’s friend can also be treated like someone’s secretary
• Bastards Telecom contacting someone’s friend on the work telephone, which in turn causes this friends problems at work
• Having general problems at work not just due to lack of an Internet connection (I do both my jobs primarily from home) but a telephone line, too
• Being told a 12 month contract is suddenly an 18 months contract despite being told and then confirming contradictory information by sales staff and signing a deal based on that information
• Being put on hold for 15 minutes while one agent listens to the recording of an older call with another agent, only to then misrepresent the customer and put all blame on the customer, obviously to defend Bastards Telecom. Humility is a disallowed term among Bastards Telecom.
• Having an agent hang up despite the customer being patient and polite
• Friends arrive and leave in anger because they cannot get in contact and therefore cannot access the building or discuss times
• Missing a few nights out for being off the telephone grid and thus unable to coordinate
• Being away from some of one’s crucial belongings, such as work equipment
• Being unable to wish the parent a “happy birthday”
• Failure to contact businesses for crucial transactions, which leads to a lot of trouble
• Having to travel by foot to a lot of places because there is no other way to make contacts
• Having to leave “telephone number” fields blank in a lot of place, then having to come back later to fill those missing parts
• Making family and friends worried that contact cannot be made (which leads to false assumptions)
• Failure to accept the shipping of a hub (for broadband) because there is no working line at home for Royal Mail to get through to the customer

In conclusion, don’t choose Bastards Telecom. Their monopoly is far from deserved, it’s more like a government franchise and they will also Phorn your phone, spying on your every activity online for for benefit of marketing companies that will pressure you to buy things you do not need and share personal information about your life and your loved one.

Bastards.

And the worst part remains ahead. They may bill me for someone else’s phonecalls, in which case more bureaucracy will be required to resolve issues relating to refunds.

What does it mean when Bastards Telecom makes false promises about broadband services and due date? It’s getting late, so the following list will be very incomplete (imagine being offline for 3 weeks when all your work is online, employers included):

• pay through the nose for mobile broadband, having had to spend hours finding an appropriate package at the shop (25 British pounds or nearly 40 dollars for just 2 gigabytes)
• struggle for hours to bring back up a failed mobile broadband connection
• work on single-head rather than dual-head display for a while, being away from one’s crucial files for several more days too (impossible for getting work done)
• not being able to make VoIP calls and make up for lack of landline (which worked fine until Bastards Telecom botched it, then claimed it’s just fine)
• not being able to blog, manage sites, etc.
• not being able to transfer any large files
• changing one’s browsing habits to account for caps
• being throttled and taking an entire night to upload just 2 audio files while the computer stays connected and uses up valuable resources
• many other Internet-related implications, as expected (I’m getting tired just thinking about it)

Bastards.

The whole thing is confirmed to be BT’s own fault. They admit it now, albeit shyly. Their staff totally messed up (maybe at risk of being fired), so right now one of them is constantly phoning my friend’s work phone (4 times today), asking urgently to meet me on Saturday, some time between a range of 5 hours (great! A fourth day having to be stuck at home, without connection to anything). So he now puts my friend’s work in jeopardy, not just my own. I don’t want anybody fired, but I know BT has been running around with the axe quite a lot recently (given their poor standards, no wonder). I am not asking BT for much, all I want is my life back, please.

N.B. – In case anyone from BT reads this, please look up VOL011-479058023564 and VOL011-47251182944.

Summary: One malicious and incompetent monopoly that everyone (where applicable) ought to avoid even more aggressively than Microsoft

O REMOVE any misinterpretations or rumours, nothing has changed at Techrights. The reason there has been so little going on since the seventh of the month is that BT is so bloody awful. When the IRC logs get posted (hopefully this month) some of the details will be made visible, but until then there are these messy notes of mine and reassurance that when all wired connectivity is back to normal, everything in Techrights too will be back to normal. Until then I will carry on coding and complete my 50-page paper about this research project that has occupied a lot of my time. Here is an out-of-date screenshot (it looks a lot nicer by now):

This post would be off topic unless some connection was drawn to items we typically covered here. What the experience with BT shows is that a monopoly — and just about any monopoly for that matter — is a very bad thing. BT has a monopoly on my line and all its competitors must go through BT to rent the line. This gives BT a lot of power and my assertive attempts to cancel the order with BT after nearly 10 hours on the phone (and two entire days waiting at the house for a delivery that never came) are pointless at best. They make it impossible and hold the line as a hostage type of tool, in order to prevent the customer from going elsewhere. As Richard Stallman once put it, when support is a monopoly no wonder it is so bad. It turns out that under my name BT even activated the wrong line, which means that some stranger somewhere is making phonecalls at my expense. What an irreversible mess! Boycott BT. Avoid is like the plague and suggest others do the same.

N.B. – In case anyone from BT reads this, please look up VOL011-479058023564 and VOL011-47251182944. For shame, I want my life back.

Executive summary: One has to be fortunate to get set up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) within days, must prepare for dozens of agonising hours as average/worst case scenario

wanted to have my Internet connection sorted out upon my arrival at the new apartment. I really did. Weeks before moving in I repeatedly asked everyone involved to leave the connection working and do the pass-over in the simplest way possible. It could not be so simple though. You see, the UK (and perhaps other countries too) has this funny procedural complexity which means that in addition to having to reassign accounts, e.g. closing one account, returning equipment, then opening another account and deploying similar equipment, there is a need to rent a line from BT. People here will attest to the experience of spending up to a month (if not more) trying to get an Internet connection running. If they feel unhappy with their current supplier — and some are said to be so atrocious that even weeks off-line is a worthwhile and acceptance exit barrier to cross — a switchover is likely to occur over and over again. Barking mad.

Here are bits of information that I found out for myself, not by reading anything on any other site (which may contain false/impartial testimonies).

O2

O2 are not so bad. In fact, most people I speak to (friends) share positive stories about O2 as an ISP and I have been using their decent mobile broadband (dongle), whereas others’ was a no-no. T-Mobile/Vodefone were too clueless, unlike O2 where few members of staff are knowledgeable enough to advise a GNU/Linux user. One member of staff in particular — a young man in a T-shirt unlike his buttoned-up colleagues — was extremely helpful; the others just gave a lot of grief, caused delays, and chose to argue rather than realise that the old saying, “the customer is always right”, probably means that the customer will eventually get his/her way anyway. So it’s a mixed bag there really.

What made O2 unacceptable as an ISP (yes, despite the good pricing) is that they started by lying about discounts for existing clients, conveniently calling the owner of a dongle a “customer” even though later on its turned out not to be the case. When a company overstates its special deals to the point of deceiving people, it is likely to disappoint through followup deceptions in the future, adding caveats, caps, and hidden fees. O2 also resorted to fairy tales about being connected within 24 hours (citing the extremely rare exception). The truth is, it often takes them weeks and there may be high charges for setup. ISPs in general compete over who is lying/spinning the most; they exaggerate setup time of their competitors (as Virgin did).

Virgin

Virgin and Sky are expensive, but maybe when cable TV is considered a necessary part of the bundle then they may turn out to be a decent deal. I visited Virgin’s shop a couple of times (and visited O2 about 5 times, for the sake of comparison), however it was not terribly helpful and the pricing for line plus broadband was not particularly appealing. Sky — like Virgin — just mailed me (unsolicited by post, i.e. snail mail) various brochures and other marketing material, but it stressed entertainment, not productivity.

TalkTalk

TalkTalk, despite all that they did to oppose the MAFIAA (although later they did some customer-hostile things well, e.g. DPI), are said to be absolutely atrocious in the sense that disconnections occur even minutes apart and their low prices can be justified/explained by their offshoring of support to poorly-paid Asian workers who merely read from the same list/script, trying to blame customers for TalkTalk’s known flaws. It is an attempt to exhaust the customer and not actually help. The bottom line is, even though I was enchanted by TalkTalk’s response to bad policies like the Digital Economy Act, TalkTalk appears to be the worst one can get. Several people said this to me, even today. Some are getting excited by the price (initially), only later realising why it is so cheap.

BT

Contacting BT is hard. Very hard, except on the phone (free calls, but hard when one’s line is not enabled, which is a sort of a recursive issue). They no longer have shops around, at least not here. They treat people like numbers and they do not keep track of customers’ problems. One agent says “do X” and then another agent knows nothing about it and says “do Y”. When one is asked to contact BT to give approval of an action, the next agent knows nothing about it (they are actually called “consultants”, which is a fancier name for people who absorb anger from customers all day long). The E-mails are almost robotic, the Web site-based forms are too. No replies to E-mails are possible. They fancy one-way communication, not in the sense of ignoring queries but in the sense that they make no queries even possible.

At BT, the gigantic size takes its toll. There are huge queues, too many members of staff who do not know what other staff said or did, and this morning I spent almost one hour just waiting in the queue to speak to a real person, which is actually not that bad after wasting dozens of hours with BT. Some lines and exchanges have better “waiting line” mechanisms/metaphors that give an estimated time until an agent becomes available. Actually, this whole fragmentation and separation into many departments is somewhat of a curse too as one hand does not work with another; for instance, BT made a mistake in the sense that one person says the contract is for 12 months, another one says 18, and it is not even possible to argue over this and point to what some other unnamed person said previously. It’s an endless battle when one speaks to a dozen different agents on a dozen different occasions about one single case of one single customer. Assignment would work a lot better (assigning an agent to a case for example). Otherwise, just as BT may record every call (to “improve the service” or something along those lines), the customer too should hold BT agents to their words by recording and playing it back later.

My story with BT is very long one and rather vexing; typically it seems better to just forget about it. But if it’s really that bad, why not share it to warn others? It might be tiring, but if others can be warned, there is a point in doing so.

To explain some basic things about the connection problems I have been having, additional background may help. I am using a machine at the computer science department at the moment, but I also temporarily use cellular-based Internet connection, which is expensive as O2 costs 7.5 pounds per gigabyte.

First of all, the reason BT is the ISP I went for is some hurried mention from a neighbour and other tenants. But BT is a monopoly, or at least a former monopoly pretending to play fair. Can it at least deliver a service to justify market leadership? They also handle the phone line, which means no messy line rentals/transferrals should be needed if one sticks with BT. Well, in theory at least! I have pressured them since the first day at the apartment (having pressured people who were there beforehand, in vain) and got an agreement with them after 2 days, over the phone. They arranged for my connection to be up 12 days from the time of the agreement (it usually takes 1-2 weeks for some unknown reason). Until now I have had no phone line or Internet at home; to make matters worse, after about 10 very long calls to them over the past two weeks it seems like my line is botched and they are sending out an engineer to fix it by Monday. The line worked fine until the day after I had made the agreement. How strange. Did they break it while trying to make modifications at some level (modifying phone numbers)?

To put this long story short, I have been very angry and disappointed with this time-consuming experience. I have never had to work so hard to get a wired, which means high-bandwidth, connection. Fortunately I have had fallbacks, but that does not justify anything (and a fallback may be hard to find, even when it’s critical for one’s job, as in my case). I hope my phone line and Internet will be up and running very soon, maybe Friday if I’m very lucky. I have not blogged or microblogged properly since the 6^th of this month. Tomorrow I visit Sunderland and Newcastle, so no progress can be made on setting up the Internet at home (Royal Mail, for example, cannot come to deliver the hub).

The bottom line is, O2 seems like a reasonable option, but none is a great choice; nothing really stands out and the bottom line is, even if one is determined to get connected as soon as possible it is unlikely to be simple. Here we are in the 21^{st century and getting connected using 20th Ethernet seems a lot more complicated than using a dongle; likewise, buying a mobile phone seems simpler than setting up one’s landline. It’s like trying to give some old gramophone a kick, or playing VHS.}