Oops, sorry. For starters I should be more clear. Cable & Wireless Guernsey are, of course, known as SureCW. Or Sure. I’m not sure. Whatever.
I suppose I should admire their motives, but they cost me money, and, more importantly my time and sanity. About 6 months ago, they announced they were upgrading their ADSL service from 1mb to 2mb. For free. Hurrah! we all thought - free upgrade to the service. But, sadly, there’s no such thing as a free broadband speed increase, and it has, quite frankly, been fraught with problems for me. The main problem is a result of them uprating to ADSL2, which, I’m led to believe is a lot more fussy about quality of service - specifically, noise on the line (SNR) which only gets worse, the further you are from the local exchange. And considering where I live in Guernsey, it’s about as far from the exchange as you can get. So what happened? Very mysteriously, up until the day they upgraded us, everything was working fine. The days and weeks after the upgrade and I had consistent problems, mostly manifest in a complete loss of service. My ADSL wireless router was still up and running, but something, somewhere was clearly not happy. A hard reboot of the router seemed to solve the problem, but the lock ups were seemingly random and, for a perfectionist arse like me, regular reboots were entirely unsatisfactory.
Now, I’m no stranger to a bit of networking - I know my DHCP server from my DNS server - and I tried literally everything I could to resolve things. Cable and Wireless, sorry, Sure, assured us (nice) that no change of hardware was required - if it worked before, it would work after - but the first thing was to check for firmware upgrades for the router. And I found some. But this didn’t solve it. Hours of talking to their “tech support” got us no further - even a change in profile - which allegedly makes the line less susceptible to noise by downrating the speed, did nothing. All the normal things - replacing ADSL filters, unplugging every bit of telephony equipment on the line, did nothing. Of course, there were times when I thought I’d pegged it, I’d announce triumphantly to the other users of the network that it was working and boom! dead.
And so, the only remaining solution? Spend money. I’m now the proud owner of a Netgear D834 wired router and an Airport Extreme. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind spending money on new toys and as I slowly but surely migrate all of my computing toys over to the ways of the Apple, the addition of the Extreme, to go with my two Airport Expresses, is no bad thing. (Really, it isn’t. It makes much sense.) And ultimately, seeing as my problems are now solved (he says, holding his breath, because it’s not unlikely that things will break shortly after submitting this), it seems pretty easy to pinpoint the problems on the DLINK router that I was using previously.
But my point is quite simple - Sure can’t offer a free upgrade and expect users to upgrade their hardware to work with it. It seems a ridiculous thing to be whinging about, it really does, because for someone like me especially, the alleged increase in speed is welcome, but, this has literally cost me no end of time and money in rectifiying it. And what’s more, I’m technically minded and enjoy tinkering with stuff like this to get things working. I know of a handful, which in reality is therefore far more people, who now have simply got in to the routine of restarting their router when things go Pete Tong. ADSL is supposed to be an “always on” service and has been for a good 7-10 years, and in this day and age (God, how old do I sound) restarting your router any more than a few times a year is unacceptable.
I’m told by “people in the know” that a lot of the problems are caused by Sure not investing well enough in decent switching and routing equipment. (And are now, allegedly in the process of sorting things out.) So full marks to Sure in the first instance in wanting to upgrade the service to ADSL2, but zero marks (negative marks if I could) for doing such a piss-poor job in the implementation.
(Don’t even get me started on the pricing.)
Captured this beauty whilst watching finals day of the Twenty20 cup at the Rose Bowl in Southampton. Kent vs Middlesex, and one particular lad in the crowd enjoying himself a lot. Top work from the wee man.
New Star Wars kid if ever I saw him.
Have you ever tried to ride a motorbike in leathers with a boner?
There’s really no excuse to be wasting energy nowadays. Microsoft, of all people, have a quick and handy guide to things you can do to reduce your company’s carbon footprint and electric bill at the same time. Go to it.
Copied from the article which is roughly here.