[OSX-Users] Re: BT Broadband?

[Hugh Glaser]

Nah, it's just the unbundling problem from my point of view.
<ducks>
In the days of the monopoly it would have worked much better (if I had been
able to get broadband at all!).
The problem was that it would have cost me more to call them out and find it
was not their fault than just switch. And I am a tight arse.
When it is these awkward problems that might be more than one of the
providers, it is hard to work out which, and the wrong one will usually
charge if you make a mistake.
Same with all the utilities now.
I think there are similar problems that contribute to safety issues on the
railways, but I don't have any personal experience of that.
So I just went for the other provider who has more of an end-to-end
responsibility; shame I can't buy end-to-end responsibility for my other
utilities and rail journeys.
<ducks />

And yes, I know this is an OSX Users group, so...

This is why (one of the reasons that) Macs have always (well usually!) been
somewhat more reliable than PCs. They have been in control of the hardware
and software. So it is pretty unlikely you would get a message about missing
a sound card/graphics/... driver, or worse, some conflict between drivers.
I have always thought that Windows was so impressive in this respect - they
never knew what hardware you were running on, or even what the drivers might
do (almost), and still managed to stagger along. For Macs it was so easy.
Of course with USB etc things have changed, but Apple still have some of the
advantage for most of their machines.

See, I did manage to mention Macs.


On 12/11/2009 12:17, "Ben Hodgson" <ben at benhodgson.com> wrote:

> It's almost worrying that a company like BT are allowed to control our
> country's comms infrastructure.
> 
> --
> http://twitter.com/blahpro
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On 12 Nov 2009, at 12:05, Hugh Glaser <hg at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Yep, the cables can be bad.
>> My ISP (I think it was onetel) were very good and tried really hard
>> to fix
>> my rate - during the day it was fine-ish, but come weekends and
>> evenings
>> (when contention climbed I guess) the rate dropped, actually because
>> of
>> failed cable/hardware, not actual contention.
>> Onetel kept trying, but basically it was BT's cabling to and in my
>> house
>> that was the problem (it still says BT, and doesn;t have a test
>> socket which
>> tells you how old it is).
>> That's the bad news.
>> Good news is I switched to cable, even though I don't use their
>> phone or TV,
>> and I get the full 10M or even a bit more any time I look.
>> 
>> 
>> On 12/11/2009 11:46, "m.c. schraefel" <mc at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>>