And if the spuds start sizzling...
They know the power's too high....
424 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2008
The reason BT was sold off in the early 80s was mainly because the government didn't want to cough up the money to upgrade all BT's old mechanical exchanges to the then new system X and system Y units. Do you really think that the government would spend any more money on telecoms if they owned the company? They'd probably just milk the profits out to cover holes in other budgets before putting a "content filter" on the system...
Yes plaster can be re-done (and the paint/wallpaper) but how likely is it your going to gouge out your wall to run a Cat5 when you can buy PLT adaptors that work fine (as far as your concerned) for less than the cost of the cable? Add to that the fact that your average person has no interest in learning to terminate cat5 and buying the kit and PLT makes sense. Tearing in to my walls to run cat5 from a router to a TV/PVR that may not be in the same places in six months is simply impractical.
When I talked my folks in to putting cat5 in to their re-wired living room I let the "competent" electrical contractor do the job. Queue one two-point faceplace at one end and two single points at the PC desk and TV. Thing was the electrician had used one cable from the twin-plate to the first socket, then wired from the first socket to the second, telephone style. Good job I checked the cables before they put the plasterboards up!
"How did people cope before wifi or pwerline network devices?"
Its only in the last 5 years that VOD directly to your TV/STB took off, not to mention the explosion in smartphones/fodleslabs and the like.
And in my case running a cat5 would have involved either going through newly painted walls or around a fireplace (and AFAIK they don't make cat5 that matches the colour of victorian brick) back to a router who's position is not yet fixed.
And before you say run cables under the carpet, i have hardwood floors.
I've run PLT to a barn 100m away from the router on a really rubbish cable with little packet loss. The only thing that really kills it is surge protectors and emf from fridges etc.
Also i bet most house wiring is inspected ressonably regularly, especially since part P came in.
Too lazy to install cat5? More likely running cat5 would involve drilling though and running cable inside walls. A messy, expensivee business. Add to that the fact that a lot of electrical contractors aren't very good at network wiring and you have your answer. Pick up two PLT units and your away in minutes, and any sheds/garages on the same supply can be hooked up too.
Regarding Wifi:it is fine when you have a new build house with plasterboard walls. Try getting a wifi signal through one or two chunky stone internal walls and get back to me. Also untill recently wifi bandwidth and reliability wern't a patch on PLT
OnDigital's main failing was it didn't provide the universal coverage that satellite could. OK, most urban areas with a service direct from a main transmitter site could get everything but for the rest of the country DTT was patchy at best. A dish nailed to the side of your house gave you a full service from Lerwick to Lewes.
Did you see a big drop in range going over the pennines or other non-flat bits of the world? I'm interested how much of an effect gradients have on the range of electric cars, as they all seem to be just about usable for my 25 mile each way commute, but I do live in mid wales, a part of the world where flat bits aren't that common.
While this car does seem to be a better bet than some rivals I simply can't see myself spending real money on a renault for one reason: build quality.
Many family members and friends have bought renaults and the difference between reliability on what should be near identical models is amazing. Some have no probs while others suffered major fuel system and mechanical maladies on cars of a similar age and condition. Add to that the 1.9 DCi's tendency to lidderally blow itself up and you get a range of cars id never consider.
While most of the other sites can be blamed on contention Tregaron is a tiny rural town in the middle of west wales. I'd be willing to bet their slow speeds are down to long, poor quality copper rather than traffic, especially since BT Wholesale seem able to deal with contention better than the LLU crew.
BT tried a similar trick up near Wrexham. They'd said that a certain village outside the town that broadband would cost a few grand for each house, so the villagers got together and started to look in to their own wireless install with guaranteed decent speed (5mbit or more). Once BT got wind of this they offered to connect all the houses to another exchange for £200 with 1mbit and a new phone number...
BT know full well they've got a monopoly outside urban areas for everything (voice and data). Even if you go for another supplier your still going to be passing some of that cash through to BT wholesale. They don't even have to try and win custom.
Considering that 80%+ of tea drunk in the UK is in teabag form, the process for creating the >20% of loose tea must be seriously wasteful to provide enough "scrapings" for all those teabags. That, or you are talking rubbish.
Give me a properly brewed MUG of good, solid breakfast tea, with a dash of milk. No more, no less.
... It still suffers from the most annoying of android features.That feature is that you can't see a message's SENT time, only the time the phone received it. If, like me, you turn your phone off overnight or spent a lot of time out of coverage you end up with a slew of messages with no clue as to their relevancy.
BL's Press department would apparently not lend out cars for extended periods, so continuity was a real pain with BL sending a yellow TR for one week's shooting and a blue one for another...
There are plenty of british made cars that are suitable. Jaguar, Land Rover, Lotus...
I think that part of the reason that the australians like their big sixes and bent eights is that when you want to cover long distances in empty outbacks you don't really want to be stuck with some expensive and lean German engine that throws a pollution management fault in the middle of nowhere and that can't be fixed without the full gamut of dealer electronic diagnosis kit.
I don't think carrying your licence with you is a requirement by law. IIRC the law states that if you get pulled over and you don't have your licence you are given a "producer", also known as the "seven day wonder" which gives you a week to produce your licence, MOT and insurance docs at your local cop shop. Your photocard driving licence isn't valid without the paper countapart anyways.I do carry my licence around with me usually, but that is out of habit/needing ID.
Modern diesels are a world away from the 1980s/1990s van engines of old BUT they have traded reliability for performance and refinement. Modern commonrail diesels have a lot of injection and emissions kit that fails in spectacular and expensive ways.
A few years back I needed to fit a new radio to my car and chose one of the early bluetooth enabled units. It is the perfect case of it "just works" technology. My handset and the radio paired up straight away and have worked fine since. I also use bluetooth for file transfer between my phone and my laptop, but the transfer speed is rather low and if I have a large number of files to transfer I tend to dig out the USB cable. It is perfect for short-range peripheral interconnects with minimal fuss and bother.
"fact that you were lucky enough to flag down an openreach engineer, who took the time to go to the exchange and correct your faulty line is fantastic"
OK, so we managed to get the line activated eventually, but your missing the point that we wouldn't have had to do that if BT had done the job right in the first place and instructed the engineer themselves to do the job on time. This line was for a festival, and was one of several booked to be ADSL enabled for a two week period.Our line was activated, I can't remember if our wireless mesh suppliers' lines (2 of) or the TV company (1of) were ever activated. One was given an activation date of the 16th of June, very handy when everything had to be de-rigged and off site by the sixth...
Fact is BT still act like they're a monopoly, which to be fair in most of the country they still are. They get away with their 1980s SLA (Voice and fax/dialup is all they legally have to supply, if their lines are faulty or they've multiplexed you with next door and you can't get ADSL then tough) while knowing full well if they bugger it up totally then the government will have to bail them out.
I've nothing against the call centre STAFF, rather the SYSTEMS they're a part of. I work with BT nearly every day covering offices over a wide area, each one connected using BT wholesale supplied broadband and using BT phone switches and ISDN lines. When you get bounced from one call centre to the other for a simple query because business faults aren't dealt with by xyz call centre but rather centre 123, who pass you over to ISDN faults which is 456 and so on it does get demoralising. By the time you've got hold of someone with authority to dispatch an engineer your phone switch is so old sales are trying to sell you a new one...
And broadband being a switch of a button? How is it then that when we had a go-live date of the 20th of may for our ADSL line it still didn't work four days later but worked 10 minutes after we flagged down a passing BT van and asked the chap to punch the pair up to the right connection strip at the exchange?
BT openworld chaps with vans are a bloody handy lot in fairness. Unfortunately BT's impenetrable customer dis-service operations mean you can't get hold of them for love nor money. I doubt the strike will be noticed, just a lengthening of the usual support wait from two weeks to four...