Previously in this mini-series: Part I, Part II, What Bad BT Engineering Looks Like, Part III, Part IV

T has failed, after 16 days, to deliver what it promised would be a trivial job. It was BT pushing me to accept the offer, which I wish I never accepted (their sales people were super-eager for me to move to fibre; I never asked for it!). In this part I want to show segments of communications, excluding addresses but not reference numbers (which BT has anyway and only BT can make sense of).

My hope is that for the many people who are going to have similarly bad experiences there will be more information available online. Yesterday even Openreach took note of my complaint and sought to intervene:

Openreach in an ‘outreach’ (PR-ish)? This is only a day old.

In part 4 I explained that there was poor communication with the client. BT was supposed to get back to me later in the day. That never happened. Instead, the following day (as before) I was asked to phone them, probably for a very long call.

BT: Just phone us because we’re too busy to phone you and please speak to a machine until you get through to an actual person (who likely knows nothing about your case, so wait on the line some more and get ready to tell us stories)

The prior message to the same effect (a week earlier):

I’ve already had to explain my case to about 5 different members of staff (BT and Openreach)

This is quite telling:

They keep closing complaints without actually solving the problem and without asking for the client’s consent to do so

They think dozens of hours of my time (and two scheduled downtimes, in vain) are worth a couple dozen quid:

Nowhere near enough to compensate for loss of time, nuisance, and many other things. Bear in mind I’ve paid BT about 5,000 pounds this past decade.

They have sent several such messages already:

It’s tiring to have appointments in vain (waiting for up to 5 hours for a person to show up and get nothing done)

As if it’ll get done this time around

As noted before, they didn’t even bother sending the bag/envelope for this until I phoned them to request one (we finally got it only a couple of days ago or about a week late).

The message caused confusion on numerous levels; in fact, it contradicts what the sales people from BT said (they don’t like disclosing the less convenient facts that allude to future hassle)

Then there’s this:

Oh, trust me, you don’t really want me to do this

It has now been 16 days (mind date of this E-mail). I’m still waiting.

16 days and counting

Previously in this mini-series: Part I, Part II What Bad BT Engineering Looks Like, Part III

T and I have talked on the phone 2 times since Openreach had left. I spoke to two people; one of them twice already with another call soon to follow. It seems to have been escalated further up, knowing it might become a PR disaster to their “Fibre” team, apparently wholly or partly based in Scotland.

They now say they have additional equipment they may be able to use to complete the job, but the last time they said they’d send a person with a hoist they sent out a person without it. Very serious oversight.

I asked the lady whether they can complete it by day’s end, noting that scheduled downtime happened twice already in vain. She said it would be almost impossible to complete today, especially if additional equipment becomes necessary.

Regarding compensation, I stressed to her this wasn’t really the point; I’ve lost so much time over the past 2 weeks due to all this and I have a massive hole in the wall, along with equipment I do not need. I probably wasted well over 10 hours already on this ‘project’ and this isn’t how it was initially marketed to me if not pushed onto me (I resisted for a long time and then they started offering managers’ discounts).

If they do complete the job at the end, which is probably inevitable, I still would not recommend anyone agrees to fibre, not this year anyway. There’s poor coordination between Openreach (infrastructure) and ISPs and what may seem like a simple installation can soon develop into a nightmare. They’re just really desperate to move people off copper — to the point of trying to convince people to ‘upgrade’ to something they would barely use. Copper is fast enough for most people. For me, personally, the benefits would be rather small though I can learn to take more advantage of higher throughput in due course. For example, remote nightly backups of my sites would be nice. For most people, the benefits would be less practical and almost impractical; the nuisance and trouble they risk going through simply isn’t worth it. My father told me they keep trying to get him to switch to fibre and he always turns them down (albeit mostly because that would entail a price increase).

I will follow up again when there’s additional information, but after 3 strikes (“you’re out!) all I can say to people is, do not move to fibre (UK residential), at least not yet. Also do not ever believe what their salesman say about it on the phone; they’re just desparately trying to secure the “sale”, leaving aside all the chaos that might thereafter come.

Previously in this mini-series: Part I, Part II, What Bad BT Engineering Looks Like

T shows its true colours… again. False promises, bad service, time wasted.

Today we have had an Openreach engineer over to complete the setup job (context above, “The Optical Fibre Experience”). I’ve not taken any photographs of the equipment set up indoors and outdoors as I assume there’s nothing particularly unique about it. It’s just some standard gear, which I’m assuming deals with signal modulation and other things I’ve got a poor grasp/understanding of (it’s well outside my professional field/domain).

The initial timeline (for when the service will/should be installed) could not be met, so they reimbursed us for the trouble. I appreciate their acknowledgement and apology (not many companies do that; in fact, many just attempt to blame the customer for every unforeseen mishap). It is expected that in the coming years more homes across the UK (maybe millions, even tens of millions in the coming decade) will have such a service installed, so it’s important to understand reliability aspects, both technical and bureaucratic. As it turned out last week, much more work was required than initially specified (like consent from neighbours to pass new wires). The upside of such migrations is that copper is always a fallback; if installation cannot succeed, it’s possible to use the old system in the interim.

As noted in the last post, I asked them about OpenWRT or similarly freedom-respecting systems at the endpoints, but they don’t support that in any way. In fact, OpenWRT would likely give them an excuse to deny customer support. They just assume uniformity among clients and would not tolerate deviation; instead of just supplying packets (like water suppliers provide water) they want to control everything including the hub/router, i.e. inside the home.

Today’s Events (So Far)

Said both verbally (on the phone) and in E-mail: Openreach will carry out maintenance between 8am and 1pm. I started losing my patience when it was almost midday (knowing that the job would certainly not be completed on time and quite possibly not even commence). Nobody had phoned or shown up by that stage!

They eventually came late, just minutes before 1AM (so the job could be completed on time). But yet worse — it could not be completed at all. They didn’t bring the equipment which over the phone BT insisted would be there to install the wires, even though we spoke about that at least 3 times on the call and BT even had Openreach on the line to confirm a person with such equipment (hoist) would be dispatched and assigned to complete the job.

Whose fault it is or maybe miscommunication alone, both the lateness and coming unprepared shows that something fails rather badly and the customers suffer again and again. I didn’t realise it would become such an agonising experience as it went along; so it is a good thing that I documented the whole thing in writing, starting with the first blunder rather than the first point of contact.

Upon further investigation, a hoist isn’t accessible to the said building, so it’s inapplicable to us and BT should have certainly checked before saying a hoist would tackle the issue; in fact, the person who showed up had no hoist at all, so it’s looking like they’re just guessing and hoping for luck. That all comes at the expense of customers, who weren’t told about such complexities in the first place.

ORISNARO says we now have “freedom”; freedom of what kind? The freedom to spread a virus? I want the freedom to not catch this virus. I want safety from people who think they’re invulnerable and therefore free to engage in “mass infection”. Today we have no option but to have a guest in the house — an Openreach technician [1, 2, 3]. Can I have the freedom to not presume risk? There’s a big difference between 55 cases a day, 550 cases a day, and 55,000 cases a day. At the moment we’re just expected to assume that many people around us are carriers and there’s nothing to be done about it. There’s no intention whatsoever to contain or reduce the spread. What kind of “freedom” is that?

As a result of those insane policies of Borisnaro and his chums we’ve decided to embrace more of a ‘bunker mode’ at home, in effect enjoying less freedom than ever before. No more gym, only particular stores for food (ones with very few people inside, sometimes tellers alone).

So now, in July 2021, I can honestly say that when my government says “Freedom” it means the exact opposite of that.

This is the same government (and person) that called racism/xenophobia “independence”. Yes, I’m talking about brexit. With the mass infection we have in the UK it seems like Europe is the beneficiary of brexit.

Original here

As the third wave of the pandemic takes hold across England, the UK Government plans to further re-open the nation. Implicit in this decision is the acceptance that infections will surge, but that this does not matter because vaccines have “broken the link between infection and mortality”¹.

On July 19, 2021—branded as Freedom Day—almost all restrictions are set to end. We believe this decision is dangerous and premature.
An end to the pandemic through population immunity requires enough of the population to be immune to prevent exponential growth of SARS-CoV-2. Population immunity is unlikely to be achieved without much higher levels of vaccination than can be reasonably expected by July 19, 2021. Proportionate mitigations will be needed to avoid hundreds of thousands of new infections, until many more are vaccinated. Nevertheless, the UK Government’s intention to ease restrictions from July 19, 2021, means that immunity will be achieved by vaccination for some people but by natural infection for others (predominantly the young). The UK Health Secretary has stated that daily cases could reach 100,000 per day over the summer months of 2021.²

The link between infection and death might have been weakened, but it has not been broken, and infection can still cause substantial morbidity in both acute and long-term illness. We have previously pointed to the dangers of relying on immunity by natural infection,³ and we have five main concerns with the UK Government’s plan to lift all restrictions at this stage of the pandemic.

First, unmitigated transmission will disproportionately affect unvaccinated children and young people who have already suffered greatly. Official UK Government data show that as of July 4, 2021, 51% of the total UK population have been fully vaccinated and 68% have been partially vaccinated. Even assuming that approximately 20% of unvaccinated people are protected by previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, this still leaves more than 17 million people with no protection against COVID-19. Given this, and the high transmissibility of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant, exponential growth will probably continue until millions more people are infected, leaving hundreds of thousands of people with long-term illness and disability.⁴

This strategy risks creating a generation left with chronic health problems and disability, the personal and economic impacts of which might be felt for decades to come.

Second, high rates of transmission in schools and in children will lead to significant educational disruption, a problem not addressed by abandoning isolation of exposed children (which is done on the basis of imperfect daily rapid tests).⁵ The root cause of educational disruption is transmission, not isolation. Strict mitigations in schools alongside measures to keep community transmission low and eventual vaccination of children will ensure children can remain in schools safely.^6,7,8 This is all the more important for clinically and socially vulnerable children. Allowing transmission to continue over the summer will create a reservoir of infection, which will probably accelerate spread when schools and universities re-open in autumn.

Third, preliminary modelling data⁹ suggest the government’s strategy provides fertile ground for the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants. This would place all at risk, including those already vaccinated, within the UK and globally. While vaccines can be updated, this requires time and resources, leaving many exposed in the interim. Spread of potentially more transmissible escape variants would disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged in our country and other countries with poor access to vaccines.

Fourth, this strategy will have a significant impact on health services and exhausted health-care staff who have not yet recovered from previous infection waves. The link between cases and hospital admissions has not been broken, and rising case numbers will inevitably lead to increased hospital admissions, applying further pressure at a time when millions of people are waiting for medical procedures and routine care.
Fifth, as deprived communities are more exposed to and more at risk from COVID-19, these policies will continue to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable and marginalised, deepening inequalities.

In light of these grave risks, and given that vaccination offers the prospect of quickly reaching the same goal of population immunity without incurring them, we consider any strategy that tolerates high levels of infection to be both unethical and illogical. The UK Government must reconsider its current strategy and take urgent steps to protect the public, including children. We believe the government is embarking on a dangerous and unethical experiment, and we call on it to pause plans to abandon mitigations on July 19, 2021.

Instead, the government should delay complete re-opening until everyone, including adolescents, have been offered vaccination and uptake is high, and until mitigation measures, especially adequate ventilation (through investment in CO2 monitors and air filtration devices) and spacing (eg, by reducing class sizes), are in place in schools. Until then, public health measures must include those called for by WHO (universal mask wearing in indoor spaces, even for those vaccinated), the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (ventilation and air filtration), and Independent SAGE (effective border quarantine; test, trace isolate, and support). This will ensure that everyone is protected and make it much less likely that we will need further restrictions or lockdowns in the autumn.

REFERENCES
1. Morton B. Covid: Boris Johnson upbeat about easing lockdown in England on 19 July. BBC News, July 4, 2021.

2. Wright K. Covid: Self-isolation to be scrapped for double-jabbed and children in England. BBC News, July 6, 2021

3. Alwan NA, Burgess RA, Ashworth S, et al. Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now. Lancet 2020; 396(10260): e71-e2.

4. ONS. Prevalence of ongoing symptoms following coronavirus (COVID-19) infection in the UK: 1 July 2021, 2021.

5. Gurdasani D. ZH, Greenhalgh T, Roberts A, Yates K, Haque Z, Michie S, McKee M, Pagel C, Hyde Z, Bassani DG, West R, Reicher S, Deeks J. Daily contact testing trials in schools are unethical and extending them to include the delta variant puts everyone at risk. BMJ Opinion 2021.

6. Gurdasani D, Alwan NA, Greenhalgh T, et al. School reopening without robust COVID-19 mitigation risks accelerating the pandemic. Lancet 2021; 397(10280): 1177-8.

7. Lessler J, Grabowski MK, Grantz KH, et al. Household COVID-19 risk and in-person schooling. Science 2021.

8. The ABC Science Collaborative Final Report for NC School Districts and Charters in Plan A, 2021.

9. Gog JR HE, Danon L, Thompson R. Vaccine escape in a heterogeneous population: insights for SARS-CoV-2 from a simple model. MedRxiv 2021.

Previously in this mini-series: Part I, Part II

few months ago BT broke my home network, using an automatic update that took over a month to correct/undo. I reported the issue to BT (over the telephone, so that took quite a while!), but they did nothing about it. They didn’t even get back to me. No follow-up. It was at that point that I considered just moving to a custom Free software router instead of these unpredictable BT hubs, which change all the time without users’ consent (remote updates). I wrote about this at the time; it was a breaking point.

Today I looked a little closer at the internals of the BT Hub, a “smart” (read: spy) one nonetheless, and decided to share something that might amuse geeks.

BT told me that they do not support OpenWRT in any way. Yet worse, one BT person told me I’d need to change to a new hub (for fibre-optics, the new modem notwithstanding), whereas another person from BT said the exact opposite. The person from Openreach, who had an appointment (in-person meeting) said it would not be necessary but regardless, I’ve decided to just keep the hub settings backup up (in case a restore is needed). It can otherwise take hours to reconfigure again (from memory/scratch).

So I’ve just made a full backup of BT Hub settings. This is what the corresponding section looks like:

When you press backup it should generate a .conf file but it is all garbled and messy when I tried it. Maybe to protect passwords? But who from? The person who made such a backup and knows those details regardless? Anyway, I’ve blurred some contents just in case something meaningful can be derived from them (the image below). Amazing:

Either way, this looks like awful engineering/design. The file is an unreadable mess. 4KB with something like pure binary (I did this twice just in case, but the same file was regenerated, not by mistake). No XML, no flat file with a setting per line.

Whose idea was this?

We’ve found our own ‘Bolsonaro’, Borisnaro Johnson

EFORE even starting, an important disclaimer: I am a vaccine proponent, but I also acknowledge the limitations. Moreover, vaccines aren’t an excuse for spreading a lethal specimen to millions of people; survivors can suffer long-term harms. Eradication should be the real goal, or at least containment of the threat/hazard.

Another clarification: This post won’t be dealing with “the economy” and politics associated with organisation of wealth, labour etc. Not because those things are irrelevant but because I wish to focus on other aspects. Not the profiteering associated with abundant testing, patent/monopoly aspects etc.

I previously spoke about first-hand experiences of friends of mine who took the AstraZeneca jabs (or just one; some were harmed so badly by the first that they chose not to get the second). All of them, bar one (female, about 34 years old), say they regret taking the jab because of severe or permanent damage caused. I’m not kidding and I don’t mean to scare people; those are the stories of people I’ve known for a very long time and they’re not lying. My friend who’s a professor in a medical field told me yesterday that his swollen knee (he has struggled to walk for a while) was definitely the result of the jab and professionals/specialists he met told him the same; they saw a surge in such cases after the vaccination. It inflames the already-sensitive tissue. I can say with sincerity that every friend of mine who took it got side effects, in one case not severe enough to cause regret. Nevertheless, there are still risks associated with AstraZeneca’s products and efficacy will vary based upon mutations/variations, genetics, among other factors. Masking and social distancing are good for those who can afford it, depending on their jobs and lifestyles. Those can change and adapt sometimes. We need to at least consider the possibility. My wife and I stopped going to the gym. We exercise outdoors and at home instead. Depending on the weather/season…

Vaccine scepticism and hesitancy, no matter the context, are nowadays all being caricatured/stigmatised as “anti-vaxx”, a rejection of science, “conspiracy theory” and so on. That’s putting aside ethical issues associated with patents of AstraZeneca. Again, not the subject of this post (it merits a separate discussion). There are also business aspects that deserve rejection; a patent waiver is well overdue.

There’s no doubt that taking a vaccine — almost irrespective of whose — will improve one’s chances of surviving COVID-19. My friend told me that had the government taken DNA samples from millions of people before the pandemic and then analysed those statistically, they’d know a lot better whose genetics would likely be more vulnerable to this virus and should be vaccinated as a matter of utmost urgency.

With new numbers in, of of 4PM yesterday, another ~55,000 new COVID-19 cases were added to the tally. In one day! Deaths are up 50% in one week, obviously with a ‘delayed effect’ or correspondence between cases and deaths (people take a few weeks to die once they contract the thing; they fight back for a while). The media and Borisnaro Johnson don’t want to tell us that, but we’re doing vastly worse than last summer. What do the medical professionals say? Here’s a new article: “1,200+ Scientists Denounce Boris Johnson’s Plan to End UK Covid Restrictions”

I was a bit angry, not optimistic, to see what I saw yesterday. There’s a heatwave, so more people go outdoors and reject face covers. People here have quit distancing and few are wearing masks (you have to dodge people as they don’t respect distance). It probably won’t be long before we have a quarter million new COVID-19 cases per day and our blowhard ‘Bolsonaro’ (Borisnaro Johnson) just says nonchalantly (surrounded by flames): “THIS IS FINE!”

They don’t find this alarming and they plan to open everything, putting at risk those who choose the freedom not to get infected.

What’s generally happening is, some people listen to our totally reckless government instead of using common sense.

It’s past 3AM here and the people across the street from us have loud parties. No isolation and no masks. This is the lessons taught by Borisnaro Johnson, our reckless superspreader, who basically wants people to think that even a million cases a day would not be a cause for concern. This sort of insane approach was tried elsewhere already… and we know what happened as a result. I hold our government fully accountable for all the superspreaders I saw yesterday in town, including the ones across the road having a party right now. There are many more parties to come next week. Will the rest of us be their ‘collateral damage’?

Two years ago we acted similarly and we know what happened months later. Then came ‘Brexit’ for no net benefit other than a shallow sense of nationalism. And now? Now we’re supposed to think that winning against a bunch of football teams is more important than defeating a virus that paralyses our economy. Forcibly reopening everything like there’s no tomorrow is economic suicide for temporary and short-term gains.

My advice to people is, do get vaccinated if your job requires meeting many people; otherwise, isolate as much as is feasible. Generally speaking, we’re nowhere near defeating this pandemic. We’re only pretending here in the UK; wait a few more weeks to see hundreds of deaths per day; wait until winter and we’ll be back to over a thousand casualties a day. “THIS IS FINE!”

As a side note, even if corporate media uses numbers like “90%” for vaccination rates remember that only 35,732,297 people (out of almost 70 million in total) got two shots; some never intend to get a second one.