* Posts by DaleWV

9 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Nov 2014

BT delays deadline for digital landline switch off date

DaleWV

1) Rural areas often have poor to non-existent mobile phone coverage.

2) A recent power cut in this area (with no mobile coverage available) lasted 6 hours and 1 hour plus outages are not uncommon. Can you afford a big enough UPS to cover that?

DaleWV

We live in a rural area badly hit by Storm Arwen a few years ago. Many people were without power and for days. The area is still poorly covered by mobile phone signal and, anyway, masts went down as their UPS systems ran out. The only thing working was their analogue copper wire phones that enabled them to call for help,

Even today we have people living less than a mile from who cannot get any cell phone signal even outside. The only means of communication for them is good old copper, which enabled them to to report their very localised power outage. Even here, just 100 meters from a cabinet we would be unable to call the emergency services should power fail beyond the battery lifetime as no mobile phone provider can give us a reliable service, especially now 3G appears to have been turned off on our nearest mast!

I firmly believe that the challenges to turning off copper, particularly in respect of the rural population in general (not just the vulnerable) not being able to contact the emergency services, has been seriously down played and under reported.

Broadband providers can now flog Openreach's new IP voice network in bid to ditch UK's copper phone lines by 2025

DaleWV

What about those without cell phone or ADSL of any sort. We have small groups of 1 or 2 premises in our Northumberland village community that are over 2 miles above ground cabling from a cabinet and surrounded by protected trees. No one has been able to provide reliable digital coms for these people. The village centre Is great (4G and/or >70Mb FTTC) but in those satellite communities there is no indoor mobile voice or data (not even 2G) and definitely no land line based data link.

What a pain in the Azzz-ure: Microsoft Azure, SharePoint, etc knocked offline by DNS blunder

DaleWV

And they want us to put business their way. Over three years with AWS and just one outage. Less than 6 months with Azure and.....

How can they seriously expect anybody who cares about uptime to recommend them.

Microsoft to spooks: WannaCrypt was inevitable, quit hoarding

DaleWV

Back Doors?

I'm surprised no one has picked and used this one as an argument against backdoors to encryption. This whole thing started when a backdoor known to the NSA got in to the public domain. Perhaps a perfect example of why backdoors are inherently unsafe.

Shakes on a plane: How dangerous is turbulence?

DaleWV

Drinks floating in front of you...

before you have chance to even take a sip Is a sure sign of turbulence.

Few years ago now (before 747-400) the 747s had to refuel in the Middle East when doing the Singapore and KL runs. I was on the way home from KL when just after the start of drinks service we hit some clear air turbulence. No warning, just suddenly my beer, still in its glass, was floating in front of my face. Negative G then zero G. Not a problem till we got back to positive G and everybody's drinks hit their tables. Had to feel sorry for the lady across the aisle with a white linen suite who had ordered port and lemon.

Always click my lap belt in place when seated now!

UK digital minister denies legal right to 10Mbps is 'damp squib'

DaleWV

Re: Bandwidth has diminishing returns

Getting 99.9% of all residents (not all are farmers who can benefit from DEFRA assistance) up to >=2Mbps should have been the target all along.

I live in Northumberland and the frustration in the rural communities regarding broadband funding has been its concentration on "High Speed" broadband. All this has meant that those who had ADSL speeds of >2Mbps got access to FTTC but those who didn't have access to broadband still did not get access to broadband.

Telecity London data centre outage borks VoIP, websites, AWS...

DaleWV

Now I can understand an undersea cable being a single point failure with possibly very wide spread implications but if a power failure on a few floors of a single building can have such wide spread implications then don't we have a deeper problem?

Fortunately for us this only really impacted our test & dev environments and, ironically, our DR capability.

Google Chrome on Windows 'completely unusable', gripe users

DaleWV

I use chrome on my iPad. Been irritated with slow scrolling through pages particularly a problem for several weeks now that have been driving me to frustration at times. Read the article and was having terrible stutter when scrolling up and down the page so just tried viewing the same pages using Safari and it is many times better. Totally unscientific experiment of course but.....