davidrickard.net

I had been using Zen for quite some time – since August 2004 apparently. They’ve been pretty good to me over the years, and I’ve had stellar service from them. BT, less so. My line speed had been steadily degrading, and for no good reason. I’d gone from getting around 4Mbs down to around 2Mbs, and lower on a bad day. No matter what I did, I couldn’t produce any sort of improvements, and Zen were unable to help as there was no ‘fault’ as such. The line was stable, and it worked, even if it was a bit slow.

I decided to move elsewhere to see if I could resolve this issue. I decided to use a company called Be. Be are what is known as an ‘unbundled’ supplier. Basically, they install their own kit into BT’s exchanges, and plug your phone line into that. All your calls still go via BT as normal, but your Internet access takes a different route at the exchange end. They also use a newer technology, ADSL2+. Zen’s product uses BT’s ADSL product, with the more recent ‘ADSL MAX’ add-ons, which allow the line to negotiate the fastest speeds it can. ADSL2+ works in pretty much the same way, only it uses all sorts of new methods to achieve the same thing, and not surprisingly, does it better.

My migration to Be took place last Tuesday. I came home from work, configured the router, and found I was now getting 3.8Mbs. A fairly good improvement. Not only that, but my upload speed has more than doubled, so sending files and emails is now much quicker too.

It proves to me there was some sort of issue on my line though. Various BT engineers have told me that sometimes at the exchange end, if equipment is overloaded, a situation can occur where line noise bleeds into neighbouring connections, i.e. mine. This then degrades the connection. BT can sometimes perform what is known as a ‘lift-and-shift’, whereby they simply unplug your connection, and physically move it to a different point. Unfortunately, getting BT to do it is very difficult, so it didn’t happen.

The only option left was to move the connection myself, by changing supplier. So far, I’m glad I did. I’m getting a better speed in downloads, and overall, the connection is far snappier at doing things, like web surfing and the like.

So, to Zen, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

We had no internet connection at work today. Nothing. Nada. Nowt.

I noticed last night that the connection had gone down. My antivirus software (Sophos) updates itself from a server at work, and it was showing a failure. I went to have a look, and noticed I couldn’t see anything. Some further digging on JANET’s service status pages showed 25 other institutions had lost connectivity too.

When I got to work, I was told a call to JANET had found it was a problem with BT’s kit, and nothing to do with us. I didn’t see it being that big a deal.

But it was.

I hadn’t realised how reliant on the web I was! There was various things I needed to do. I needed to research a product, but couldn’t. I needed to research how to change some stuff, but couldn’t. I needed to look up some documentation for something, but – well, you know.

It wasn’t just me. Most of my colleagues were sitting around twiddling thumbs waiting for it to come back. There’s so much stuff now hosted online, instead of being in printed manuals, that there’s a heavy reliance on it. A REALLY heavy reliance. That’s not to say we all look stuff up and know nothing. We end up doing so many new and different things, we’re often researching things.

Even trivial stuff got annoying. We were talking about a recent episode of Heroes, to which I said ‘Just go look it up on IMDB’. Yeah, that won’t work.

I looked again earlier, and noticed it’d come back. At least I’ll be able to find stuff tomorrow.