The Internetz and me

I started using dial-up many years ago when UUCP was doing the heavy lifting, and Kermit was fighting with X, Y and ZMODEM.
I have used remote access for a long time.

No technology in my life has ever frustrated me more. If I got a good connect, the file transfer failed. If I got lousy speed then the file transfers took forever and still failed. Mostly things just failed - but - every so often it all came together and it just worked, giving a glimpse of what could be possible.

Fast forward to today. We have blistering fast broadband in every house. Everybody is on-line all the time. We can download as much music, video, and other content as we want. It is always there, always on and always available. That's the picture painted by the ISP's, the media and those trying to sell you stuff.

The reality is that some of us have blistering fast broadband speed (cabled areas, those who live on top of the BT exchanges) - the rest of us have todays technology delivered (slowly) by last centuries infrastructure, intermittently.

The ISP's have restricted how much we can download (caps and "fair use" policies), they push ever faster (more expensive) packages, when they know the delivering technology cannot deliver anymore than what you are getting today, they change the fine print, they traffic shape your p2p traffic on the grounds that these services are "illegal", when the reality is that their crappy (rented) networks can't handle the traffic on the bandwidth they are overselling.

You are branded a thief if you download music (even from sites where the music is original and freely distributable), download a video (legally) from anywhere and boy, you better watch it quick, or it will disappear off your computer in 10/20/30 days whatever. Access a web site and chances are you will be asked to participate in a survey/have a pop-up add in your face, have to listen to someones (not your) choice of music, have spyware, crapware, trojans or viruses attacking your computer. And don't get me started on spam and spammers. There has to be a special version of Hell for those bastards!

Last October I changed my package with the same ISP from a fixed rate 2mb package (that was rock steady at 2 and a little bit megabits)to an ADSL+ package capable of upto 8Mb - I knew I would not get any increase in speed (my line is incapable of more), but it was UKP100 (per year) cheaper than the package I had.

Big Mistake.

I now have a rock steady (most days!) internet connection at .5 to .75Mb.
Roughly one quarter to one third the speed I had before.

I have contacted my ISP about this over the last 4 months, and they finally (after many tries and me jumping through all the diagnostic hoops they could conjure up) agree that the line is the problem, and to progress this, a BT engineer should come to the house and inspect my equipment and internal wiring (huh?). Oh, and by the way, they will charge you UKP188 pounds for the privilege - according to them, the charge is levied only if they find a fault in your equipment. They don't charge if they find a fault in their equipment - which is really big of them.

I have been dealing with BT from the days of ISDN data connections, and let me assure you, they *never* admit a fault. Your problem magically disappears some time after BT have been notified of it (usually!), but it was never their fault.

Case in point. I lost my internet connection in 2009 for three days. The ISP was useless, they couldn't do anything - it was a fault at the exchange. Finally, after three days it "just came back on". When I asked for the report from BT, I was given a one sentence report that explained nothing.

So, whats the answer?

Well, for me, I have changed ISPs to a firm that have a reputation of being a little bit more pro-active on their customers behalf, and I have moved onto a month by month contract (I will never get a long term contract again) and I have begun exploring other methods of Internet connection.
Satellite and Mobile Internet are the front runners at the moment.

For you, I don't know what the answer is, - but I can surely say that the model of using an ISP who doesn't own the delivering infrastructure is fatally flawed - you end up as the ball in a three-way ping-pong match between you, your ISP and BT.

Not pretty. Which just about sums up the state of the "Information Superhighway" in my part of the UK.