I love cloud computing. It allows me to work and store all my documents, spreadsheets and presentations online; I can utilise programs to help project manage work and keep track of all colleagues; if I wanted to I could keep track of all my finances with Mint, Freshbooks or Quicken; I can collaborate with colleagues and friends using Google Wave – the list goes on and on. Until my internet connections curls up its little toes and dies that is!
Let me explain why this is such a big deal. I live in the middle of nowhere. I know that’s my choice and if it’s a 50 mile round trip to do the supermarket shopping I have no-one to blame but myself. When I moved here I wasn’t aware that the cottage had a shared DACS connection and that my dial-up speed would average 14kbs. Come on , who goes house hunting with a laptop and modem and plugs it all in to see what the connection speed is? You never see the broadband speed in estate agents’ details do you?
This was the sort of scenario where you start the download your email and then take the dog for an hour’s walk and get back and come over all excited if anything has downloaded! If you want to download the latest iTunes go out for dinner, watch a DVD …
Two years ago I discovered I qualified for a Government initiative whereby anyone that was in direct line of sight of a radio mast 12 miles away could qualify for an installation of a over-the-air broadband service so, naturally, I jumped at it. The 2mb download speed was simply awesome and the service I received from Thus, the company providing the package, was first rate. The engineer Steve was a star who spent probably more time tweaking the system for me than he should but that is excellent customer service and I appreciated it and felt loyalty to Thus because of this.
All was well for some time until Thus decided it was handing over the administration to Daisy PLC. I won’t dwell in this too long but the relationship has been somewhat fractious but I am not in a position to tell the company to put the service where the sun doesn’t shine because there is no alternative.
A few houses in the area have had “broadband” installed but it limps along at 200kbs, a huge improvement over dial up but one heck of a retrogressive step for me for cutting my nose off to spite my face. Unlike millions of others I do not have the pleasure of being able to choose between a healthy selection of landline broadband providers to give me a decent speed. At the moment I am looking at mobile broadband via a dongle, it’s not cheap but it’s a standby option if things cut up rough between me and Daisy.
Recently the Government announced it was freeing up radio bandwidth for OTA broadband. This is an excellent way of beaming a fast and reliable service to rural dwellings without having to resort of rolling out BT’s “we still like copper” option that it wants the public to pay for via a broadband tax!
Last Thursday I got up at 5.30am and there was no service and it didn’t come back on until about 6.45am. On Sunday the service died just before 2pm and didn’t return until around 8pm. On Sunday I fired off an email from my mobile phone and got a reply asking for account number and phone number. They replied saying they couldn’t find me as a customer and I replied that it was not a landline service but an OTA package. Just had two help guys email me asking for the broadband phone number and when I say it’s an OTA package they disappear!
To be fair this is the first set of downtime in two years which isn’t bad but for me broadband is not just vaguely useful but totally essential and I resent being held hostage but being a deeply philosophical sort of person I realise crap happens.
Tech support update: three days and counting – no feedback on outages.
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