Orange (E E) are moving me to a new broadband tarif system, as th eold one is closing. They promised no interruption to service, but email has disappeared and I am locked out of my email accounts. Broadband was supposed to be upgraded to "up to 19Mbs" but although I can get on the internet it's about 19 bits per second not the superfast speed increase promised.
Anybody sending me emails I'm not ignoring them, just unable to send or receive anything apart from via hotmail.
EE = Everything Everywhere? Nothing Nowhere more like.
Warning: Diatribe and O/T
Wow.
Back in the 90s, when I was starting my new relationship with an American woman and we decided to get married, we sat down and had a long conversation about which country we wanted to make our home.
We discussed the relative merits of the education systems, the problems of the class system in England, the problems of American culture, and so forth.
We finally came to the realization that we were very unlikely to have children, and that our lives would be laden, nay dripping with technology. We looked at the relative states of broadband in both countries and our decision became clear.
In 1999 the average Time Warner cable speed here was 1.5 mbits up, 20 mbits down. Now, our basic service is 1.5 mbits up, 30 mbits down (the economy tariff). The speedy tier is the $59/month package (less than forty quid) which offers 2 mbits up, 55 mbits down. It has a turbo boost feature where the first 150 mbytes of a large download is accelerated to over 100 mbits. I can stream netflix movies all day long and not hit caps, watching full 1080p all day.
I sit here in my cozy little den and read about the technology hurdles faced by my still-pat brit friends. I see how BT works with other companies and it reminds me of AT&T, and how they "worked with" the independent ISPs here in 1998-2005 during the roll out of DSL nationwide. The people had no patience for that sort of back-stabby shenanigans, and now DSL is not a service in the US any more. Everyone uses cable, most on fiber. My IP hasn't changed in two years, and besides one power failure after a windstorm where the whole town lost power for six hours (I had backup power that outlasted the cable company and they went down but my end was still live) I have never had an outage.
Rural community networks have popped up like molehills here. The favored route is a solar panel, battery, and wifi router running ddWRT (and nowadays using this tiny little computer you guys probably haven't ever heard of, a Strawberry Pi or something!) to create mesh wireless networks to provide failover redundancy for rural users who have poor connections. Traffic gets distributed across the many working connections on the mesh, and now those far out users have reliable, fast internet that beats the pants off anything in town.
Even in town, often a city block will come together and arrange their own internet service. They'll order an OC-3 or even an OC-48 and install fiber or gigabit ethernet to the around 80% of households which opt to participate.
Nobody allows their ISP to also be their email service provider. It's too large a failure point. Most people here have personal domain names, hosted by google or some such. Even if their ISP gets nuked off the map, their email survives and remains accessible from the next connection.
What is needed is a radical change of English culture both at the business level and neighbor level. You have to imagine bandwidth is as important as food, and a resource to be shared, carefully curated and constantly improved upon. You maybe need to become a little more American in having high expectations, and little tolerance for poor service or pricing. Force your providers to compete for your business in a fundamentally real way.
Otherwise, your internet is going to continue to suck.
Back in the 90s, when I was starting my new relationship with an American woman and we decided to get married, we sat down and had a long conversation about which country we wanted to make our home.
We discussed the relative merits of the education systems, the problems of the class system in England, the problems of American culture, and so forth.
We finally came to the realization that we were very unlikely to have children, and that our lives would be laden, nay dripping with technology. We looked at the relative states of broadband in both countries and our decision became clear.
In 1999 the average Time Warner cable speed here was 1.5 mbits up, 20 mbits down. Now, our basic service is 1.5 mbits up, 30 mbits down (the economy tariff). The speedy tier is the $59/month package (less than forty quid) which offers 2 mbits up, 55 mbits down. It has a turbo boost feature where the first 150 mbytes of a large download is accelerated to over 100 mbits. I can stream netflix movies all day long and not hit caps, watching full 1080p all day.
I sit here in my cozy little den and read about the technology hurdles faced by my still-pat brit friends. I see how BT works with other companies and it reminds me of AT&T, and how they "worked with" the independent ISPs here in 1998-2005 during the roll out of DSL nationwide. The people had no patience for that sort of back-stabby shenanigans, and now DSL is not a service in the US any more. Everyone uses cable, most on fiber. My IP hasn't changed in two years, and besides one power failure after a windstorm where the whole town lost power for six hours (I had backup power that outlasted the cable company and they went down but my end was still live) I have never had an outage.
Rural community networks have popped up like molehills here. The favored route is a solar panel, battery, and wifi router running ddWRT (and nowadays using this tiny little computer you guys probably haven't ever heard of, a Strawberry Pi or something!) to create mesh wireless networks to provide failover redundancy for rural users who have poor connections. Traffic gets distributed across the many working connections on the mesh, and now those far out users have reliable, fast internet that beats the pants off anything in town.
Even in town, often a city block will come together and arrange their own internet service. They'll order an OC-3 or even an OC-48 and install fiber or gigabit ethernet to the around 80% of households which opt to participate.
Nobody allows their ISP to also be their email service provider. It's too large a failure point. Most people here have personal domain names, hosted by google or some such. Even if their ISP gets nuked off the map, their email survives and remains accessible from the next connection.
What is needed is a radical change of English culture both at the business level and neighbor level. You have to imagine bandwidth is as important as food, and a resource to be shared, carefully curated and constantly improved upon. You maybe need to become a little more American in having high expectations, and little tolerance for poor service or pricing. Force your providers to compete for your business in a fundamentally real way.
Otherwise, your internet is going to continue to suck.
Re: Email
Well said (or well ranted as the case may be).
I do have a domain of my own (the dilwyn dot me dot uk) but of course to send and receive I have to use Orange or EE or whatever they like to be called these days.
Oh, and we missed in the small print that moving to this new tariff means we are locked into a 12 month contract with Orange/EE now! Which I consider a bit unfair as the old tariff was ending. In effect it was blackmail, move to a new more expensive tariff (and 12 months minimum) or lose much of your service, albeit the new tariff offers a lot more even if i'm not sure i need all the extras.
I have to be positive though - although speed has left a lot to be desired, actual full outages have been VERY few and far between in the last couple of years, which I have to be grateful for and is perhaps the reason why I've stayed with EE this long when I hear everyone I know complain about their ISP.
I do have a domain of my own (the dilwyn dot me dot uk) but of course to send and receive I have to use Orange or EE or whatever they like to be called these days.
Oh, and we missed in the small print that moving to this new tariff means we are locked into a 12 month contract with Orange/EE now! Which I consider a bit unfair as the old tariff was ending. In effect it was blackmail, move to a new more expensive tariff (and 12 months minimum) or lose much of your service, albeit the new tariff offers a lot more even if i'm not sure i need all the extras.
I have to be positive though - although speed has left a lot to be desired, actual full outages have been VERY few and far between in the last couple of years, which I have to be grateful for and is perhaps the reason why I've stayed with EE this long when I hear everyone I know complain about their ISP.
--
All things QL - https://dilwyn.qlforum.co.uk/index.html
All things QL - https://dilwyn.qlforum.co.uk/index.html
Re: Email
Dave, I'm not sure where you are, but I think some of your statements are off.
>Everyone uses cable
I know a lot of folks that don't use cable for Internet access (me for one).
>Nobody allows their ISP to also be their email service provider.
I know a lot of folks with e-mail addresses that are from ISPs. I have an sbcglobal.net account. Some folks use yahoo or gmail, but mostly because they don't have the primary e-mail address for the account. I have 5 people in my house and I'm the only one using the sbcglobal.net e-mail, because it's my account. Everyone else uses a web-based e-mail address.
> Most people here have personal domain names
Even in Silicon Valley having a personal domain is not common. I'd say less than 10% of folks I work with might have their own domain.
Tim Swenson
>Everyone uses cable
I know a lot of folks that don't use cable for Internet access (me for one).
>Nobody allows their ISP to also be their email service provider.
I know a lot of folks with e-mail addresses that are from ISPs. I have an sbcglobal.net account. Some folks use yahoo or gmail, but mostly because they don't have the primary e-mail address for the account. I have 5 people in my house and I'm the only one using the sbcglobal.net e-mail, because it's my account. Everyone else uses a web-based e-mail address.
> Most people here have personal domain names
Even in Silicon Valley having a personal domain is not common. I'd say less than 10% of folks I work with might have their own domain.
Tim Swenson
Re: Email
Gents,
Europe has a much less dense cable internet penetration than the US, that's true. Cable companies were pretty late here.
I find that one interesting:
https://fiber.google.com/about/
Pay a one-time installation fee of $300 and have free internet for at least 7 years. Typical Google business model - Upgrade any time to Gigabit(!) speed for 70$ a month.
You need to move to Kansas, however.....
Regards,
Tobias
Europe has a much less dense cable internet penetration than the US, that's true. Cable companies were pretty late here.
I find that one interesting:
https://fiber.google.com/about/
Pay a one-time installation fee of $300 and have free internet for at least 7 years. Typical Google business model - Upgrade any time to Gigabit(!) speed for 70$ a month.
You need to move to Kansas, however.....
Regards,
Tobias
ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ ǝq oʇ ƃuᴉoƃ ʇou sᴉ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ʇxǝu ʎɯ 'ɹɐǝp ɥO
Re: Email
It does seem to be the case that outliers tend to know a lot of other outliers. In the US, the statistics speak for themselves. Cable provides 82% of residential internet service, and the vast majority of DSL installations are outside large cities, where cable is not a choice.swensont wrote:Dave, I'm not sure where you are, but I think some of your statements are off.
>Everyone uses cable
I know a lot of folks that don't use cable for Internet access (me for one).
80% of the people using that connection have a 3rd party email provider, which fits my experience.swensont wrote:>Nobody allows their ISP to also be their email service provider.
I know a lot of folks with e-mail addresses that are from ISPs. I have an sbcglobal.net account. Some folks use yahoo or gmail, but mostly because they don't have the primary e-mail address for the account. I have 5 people in my house and I'm the only one using the sbcglobal.net e-mail, because it's my account. Everyone else uses a web-based e-mail address.
I went through my address book and counted to make sure I wasn't kidding myself. I counted US people using domain names, people using email services, and people using providers email. I have 26 using their own or friends' domain names, 18 using a 3rd party provider like google or yahoo or an employer, and four using ISP-specific - you included. That's just my experience.swensont wrote:> Most people here have personal domain names
Even in Silicon Valley having a personal domain is not common. I'd say less than 10% of folks I work with might have their own domain.
Tim Swenson
The point of my post wasn't to say how great US internet access is, it's not that great, but compared to the mess in the UK, it's a delight.