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Tuesday 16 September 2008

Our ISP.

By our I mean it in the sense that the ISP is in our city via our cities telephone system. We are somewhat unique in Kingston-upon-Hull in that we have our own telephone network totally separate from BT/Virgin etc from which the rest of the country benefits in a way we cannot. That benefit is if you hae problems with your current ISP you can simply jump ship and sign up elsewhere. You can do this as many times as there are iSP's available to you. It is that telephone company the provides the city's ADSL offerings. Apart from those ISP's that provide only dialup services and another that supposedly provides ADSL and one other that claims to be providing fibre based services (I say claims to be as I have yet to fine any installations done) our ISP being a child offspring offering ADSL  based services off the back of the telephone provider Mother ship is all we have here.

That being the case. When the ISP in question buggers things up or is, as any child can be, petulant or simply does not offer what customers, home customers in particular, want  then we have no other ISP to go to. Sure we could use 'mobile Internet' but that has problems of its own here, such as low signals which makes using mobile Internet something akin to the old, and now ancient, dialup services.

Right now, there are huge problems with the ISP's ADSL2+ offerings. All over the city, in every single exchange area, people are getting low sync (down) speeds. Lower, in some cases much lower, (down) sync speeds than they had on the older ADSL services. One always knows when they have a problem or two as they do not return emails. Emailing their technical support is a waste of time as they just trot out the company line. Emailing cutomer support is like pulling teeth with a spoon. I.E. something worth considering but once commonsense has kicked in the idea ia forgotten. apart from that, emailing customer support is a waste of time as they too trot out the company line, along with such gems as "have you changed your settings" which is fast becoming the watch word for the ISP's  customer service team. They are frankly a joke. Getting any information out of them is akin to getting water out of a stone. On occasions emailing them does return a decent result but when the shit hits the fan they hide away.

We are in discussions (as part of our normal monthly meetings) with said ISP in an effort to find out why their ADSL2+ is so crap.  So far they have trotted out  'line length'  and 'incompatible hardware (meaning modem/routers and plain modems) which is all well and good for the masses as an excuse but us more techincally aware people know that those are simple excuses. While they do obviously play a part in end user sync speeds in a city such as we are with its tightly setup network of cabling we do not believe  for one minute those are the cause of the low down sync speeds. They are not talking with yor average Joe here they are talking to two people that have years of network and telephony experience between them. So, while they can fob off a lot of folk they cannot as easily fob us two off. Of course there are those within our group that think they know everything and often times come up with utter bullshit but others know who they are so ignore them for what they are.

In the next day or so we should be finding out the waht, why and how come.

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