The Horror Of British Telecom 651
MBCook writes "'Someone, raised amidst the elegant lattice of custom and tradition that serves as the foundation of English society, came up with a very elegant, very British, solution to broadband policy here.
And it absolutely, positively sucks.' So starts an article by Mark Hachman over at ExtremeTech chronicling his odyssey to get broadband in his new flat."
Re:What's taking so long? (Score:2, Insightful)
Poor article (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure, I can appreciate the guy is pissed off, but there is no need to get to low-level xenophobia.
The article is xenophobic and patronising to the British. Please don't call our institutions quaint, it's not funny, it's patronising.
To quote the author: "(Do we even have "faults" on the line in the U.S.?)". Don't be so daft. Of course you have phone line faults.
Was there any point in this article other than to create tension on Slashdot?
Even the article summary is filled with needless opinion and laced with xenophobia (the tone being: the British have falled off a pedestal)
Not impressed.
Re:Poor article (Score:2, Insightful)
HOWEVER, you Yanks better not forget that your "cellphone", or as we backward Brits like to call it, "mobile" service is years behind ours.
I hear you could only recently send cross-network texts (SMS)? too bad, too bad!
Let's review... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, let's review the procedure for obtaining broadband in the UK:
Step #1: Call up BT, to make sure you have a line capable of receiving broadband. (Apparently everyone in the US can receive a broadband connection. That's what this guy says, anyway!)
Step #2: l up your cable or DSL provider, walk through the options, and decide what you want.
Step #3: Receive and install the modem, or have an installer do it for you.
Step #4: There is no Step 4! Unless there's a problem, in which case the useless bureaucracy of BT kicks in!
Seriously though, this guy's problem with "The Horror of BT" is just him making a lot of noise about nothing. There's plenty of room for more legitimate gripes about how BT run things - for instance, if you have a fault with a line, their engineers will only come out between 9am-5pm Mon-Fri. Absolutely useless for 99% of the working population!
Re:What's taking so long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you in possession of the facts?
You can get 2Mbps for £14.99 (about $28.17) per month.
2Mbps is the highest speed generally available.
Later this year, higher speeds will be available (up to 7.2 Mbps), and "hip" ISPs will offer these speeds at no extra charge. "shitty" ISPs (e.g. BT) will probably restrict the higher rates to premium services.
Re:What's taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well the lines atleast , it gave the private BT a near unbreakable telephone monopoly outside of state controll due to the rather pathetic regulators.
If only they had just privatised the telephone service alone and kept the lines state owned we likely wouldnt see many of the problems
Everything must go through BT at one stage so prices are allowed to pile on and they have no real reason to worry about reducing costs as either way they make money.
Just my opinion , but i don't like infrastructes such as water
Re:Poor article (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides the whole BT system sounds not so much quaint as uselessly fucked up. Why are you choosing to read criticism of such an assbackwards system as xenophobia against the brittish? If he wanted to do that, he could have just refered to the people he dealt with at the various isp's as being limp-wristed tea-sucking limeys--but he didnt. In fact there were no negative imprecations against britain at all apart from what he saw as the rather neolitic broadband situation, which seemed pretty well justified. In fact he started out by making sure that it was understood that he happened to like the place and that his was not a typical UglyAmerican tirade against a foreign country for not being america.
I think you're reaching a bit
chill
Re:Poor article (Score:5, Insightful)
To label a self-deprecating piece by an American who has moved to the UK, and has a lot of positive things to say about the UK as 'xenophobic' is
+Pete
I see his problem... (Score:2, Insightful)
I can see how it's irritating, but as nightmare stories go, I've seen a lot worse.
He's an idiot... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Poor article (Score:3, Insightful)
Bull, you are way too touchy
It's you that makes the connection of British = bad service.
The OP says British Telecom = bad service.
Yes he compares with the US, that's only logic as it is his natural benchmark
In The Netherlands we've seen similar problems when switching ISP's.
But the OPTA, the independent regulator, has been able to set some strict quality criteria and the phone company that owns the lines has lately become a lot more respondent.
Of course it did take some moaning by consumer groups to make it happen.
Was there any point in this article other than to create tension on Slashdot?
Ignoring your ID I'm tempted to ask how new you are around here :-)
Re:Poor article (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's taking so long? (Score:3, Insightful)
I could imagine myself wanting a full set of Debian ISO images now and again. That might take 10Gb of my cap. But why I'd want to do that more than once a month at most I have no idea.
The only scenario I can think of where 30Gb a month might be low is if your downloading a new film (I nearly wrote "movie") every day or two. If you have the time on your hands to watch that much video, then you presumably have the money to afford a leased line.
But in seriousness, I would like to hear what use a private individual - even a geek - would currently have for downloading 30Gb a month.
None of this should be taken to mean that I think broadband shouldn't be faster, cheaper and with fewer limits. I just can't see why you would say 30Gb is "pant".
Exactly! (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, let's just look at the Deutsche Telekom here. They didn't just get the whole phone and data lines, they actually got the TV cables too. I.e., they got _everything_ that could have been competition.
Can you even get a cable modem instead of DSL? Well, no, in 90% of Germany you can't, because the Telekom isn't going to compete with itself.
Re:Poor article (Score:3, Insightful)
At my home they're renting out a number of holiday cottages as full term lets now so there aren't enough phone lines serving the place. Next week, rather than install a splitter and cause us to lose our ADSL, BT are going to replace six miles of cable to our house, as we live out in the sticks.
Please note that this cable is of sufficiently high quality to sustain a 2Mbit ADSL connection over a loop distance of 12 miles.
And a final comment to the author - you NEVER get anything out of a company by bitching on at their telephone staff. You think they've never heard it before, cause they have. If you're polite and hit it off they'll try to move heaven and earth for you... or at least that's been my experience.
Re:I Once Wanted to Live in England... (Score:1, Insightful)
When you see a WTO protest, where MPs actually come out and talk to the protesters, instead of gassing them and setting the dogs on them - where you see all type of political dissent and not one accusation of "hating democracy", and most importantly, England is a country of real opportunity.
You can do whatever you want there, and you start out in the world without a $40k college loan note, and with health insurance.
yeah, at least he could a mobile that worked (Score:1, Insightful)
Whereas US mobile phones, what an epic.
1. you need to work out which providers have approximate coverage in the places you live, work and travel.
2. you then need to decide between prepay or x-minute contracts.
3. prepay is very expensive, minutes expire unless you phone is topped up, not available everywhere.
4. x-minute contracts are rounded up minutes. Its not "50 minutes of calls a month", its "50 calls a month, of 1 minute or less each". And the minutes expire.
5. you pay to receive calls, on your mobile. So family minutes are cut in half if they are used intra-family.
6. you pay to receive text messages!
7. there is no such thing as text message interop! You cant text other networks. So you need to know the network of your friends.
8. Different network providers have different handsets. You cant juggle SIM cards around or choose the phone you want.
9. When you buy a phone, you pay an "activation fee" for some idiot in the shop to turn it on and press a few buttons.
10. phones are bound to a particular area code. If you move, you either need a new number, or people pay long distance rates to get to your phone.
Clearly the incompetence and pricing of EU land lines helped encourage good mobile phone networks. But also those crushing government standards bodies that mandated GSM everywhere, SIM cards everywhere ended up creating an ecosystem of phones, SIM cards and low friction switching between providers. It also created a new crime: phone theft, but that's another story.
-steve
Re:What's taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't speak for the last two, but I do know that with water, power and the railways, before they were privatised, sucessive governments regarded skipping on infrastructure investment as an easy way to save money. Sure the regulators could tell them off, but if the investment wasn't forthcoming, there was nothing being done. By removing these industries from the government teat, and by enforcing the regulations on the new private owners, the infrastructure is only now beginning to come up to the required standards. Sure it may end up costing more, but its a far better situation than waiting for unmaintained infrastructure the collapse.
Re:I Once Wanted to Live in England... (Score:1, Insightful)
It's pretty steep but not as high as much of Northern Europe. Typically, people are taxed at about 1/3 of their salary and point of payment. At a rough guess I'd say we pay ~45% tax when everything is taken into account.
- Mandatory, expensive and mediocre health care.
That's fair enough
- Cameras everywhere.
- Cameras monitoring every meaningful inch of public space.
It's really not that bad. As with most things in Britain, things are put in place if there is a (perceived) problem to be addressed. If there is a crime problem in an area cameras might be put up, or there might be local demand for it.
- A sensationalistic press that makes Fox look bi-partisan.
TV wise The BBC provides one of the, if not the best services in the world.
We get Fox in the form of Sky satilite tv and Rupert Murdoch also owns The Sun (red top tabloid, very sensationalistic) and The Times (right wing broadsheet).
As for other channels and papers some are pretty bad that way but generally they seem less low rent than the American popular press.
- Out of control, bureaucratic utilities (like the article states).
I wouldn't say out of control. There is competition in all utilities except water. I've not really come across much bureaucracy other than with BT in the utilitise are.
- Television licenses along with warrant-less searches of homes suspected of running an unlicensed television.
A warrant is required to search homes. They have to have some proof you have a TV too.
- Speed traps everywhere, set to excessively low limits and with giant fines.
£60 fine for minor offense. 10%+2mph over the speed limit. The speed limits are there anyway, the cameras are just enforcing them. Speed on motorways/dual carrageways is 70mph, 60mph for stardard inter-urban roads, urban streets 30mph. 50 and 40 is also used in some situations.
I'm not sure they are excessively low speeds. People don't seem to object enough to lobby parliament seriously about it.
Re:Learn some f***ing geography (Score:3, Insightful)
this has just been about being recognised
many people naturaly equate national pride to hatred of other nations or Belife in superiorty
This is in no way true for the SNP and like movements in Scotland such as the SSP
Being a Scottish nationalist is not about your hatred of the rest its about your love for your land and the people who live there
To be recognised as our own country through the will of the people so we can fully join the EU and progress and be allowed to make decision which benifit us and the world and have our voices heard.
Its about independance and Freedom
http:/// [http]http://www.snp.org/> something of which i am sure many americans can relate to through their history , Remember America was in the same situation at one point.
the SNPs position on idependance is this
Commen intrests not commen heritage . an important differance .
I like Dave Thompsons view on the subject
This is a commen sentiment ,to quote a piece from the manifesto of views of the snp
Its about equality mate not hatred.
What this has to with BT and the topic is simply this , Because of the conservitive majority(now new labour otherwise known as old conservative our views were erroded and simply we had to sit there and take it , so many of these state monoplys have been turned from a monopoly we can influence to something we have little choise over but is still a monopoly. We are forced to pay out the nose as more and mor
Re:What's taking so long? (Score:1, Insightful)
Indeed these wouldn't have occurred. Because there'd be no broadband service. I'm old enough to remember before privatisation. A months-long waiting list to get a single line installed. With a hardwired phone that had to be rented from them. They were not a good advertisement for state control.
I Once Wanted to Live in America... (Score:4, Insightful)
But anyway, here in the UK taxes seem reasonable to me. I have to pay for society afterall.
Healthcare seems fine.
I don't notice the cameras really.
Yeah the bureacuracy sucks.
TV Licenses are cheap and the result is great, advert-free, TV, great radio stations and a great bbc online resource. At the very least it pays for Doctor Who.
Speed Cameras make it less likely that some speeding arsehole will get me killed, and don't bother me because I don't break the speed limit! The fines aren't much really, I think it's the 3 points on the license that hurt.
I don't mind cameras, speed cameras, etc. Who the fuck cares if they're getting watched? I'd much rather be safe on the streets and the roads, which I believe these cameras assist.
Blame Thatcher and the Conservatives (Score:2, Insightful)
Blame Maggie Thatcher. A lot of what was later tagged "Thatcherism" as some sort of philosophy was actually more the consequences of political expediency than any idealism.
In the case of BT, the Tories wanted the money. They could have privatised it properly (i.e. such that there was a genuine free market), or they could have done it quickly, giving us the worst of both worlds- a private monopoly that required lots of regulation and was still crap.
They chose to do it quickly, because they wanted the money. All that "free-market" crap was tacked on as justification. If they'd meant it, they would have taken the long but effective route.
Competition? Ha ha. Remember those Mercury phone booths that appeared in the early 90s(?) and disappeared not too long afterwards? That was your lot. It took 15 years for any sort of competition to reach your average consumer, and as we can see, it's still reliant on BT.
Thanks Maggie.
Re:I Once Wanted to Live in England... (Score:3, Insightful)
- Huge taxation.
Compare to where? Certainly many countries on mainland Europe have higher tax rates (and some have better standard of living as well). VAT (sale tax) is 17.5%, but it is not on some items. Income tax has 20, 25 and 40 percent bands. Historically it used to be a lot higher, so I think we compare it with what it was and Europe.
Fuel tax does annoy people, we pay more for petrol than just about anywhere else and a huge chunk of that is tax.
- Mandatory, expensive and mediocre health care.
Although many people complain about the state of the NHS (which has been improving) British people in general are proud of having it. The fact you can get free treatment is seen as a good thing. Indeed, I think we tend to regard American as rather odd of not having such a health service when most of the rest of the developed world does.
How expensive it is will of course depend on how much tax you pay.
- Cameras everywhere.
Yes, and the scary thing is you don't notice or think about them. I don't think they really accomplish anything.
- A sensationalistic press that makes Fox look bi-partisan.
The tabloids are awful, but only part of the press. The more intellectual papers are called broadsheets (Times, Guardian, Independent) and are pretty good. Parts of the press are sensationalistic, but not the whole thing. Plus we get the BBC, generally regarded as one of the best and most unbiased news organisations.
- Out of control, bureaucratic utilities (like the article states).
I notice there are plenty of post by Americans complaining about similar experiences with American companies. I don't think there is anything particularly British about this.
- Television licenses along with warrant-less searches of homes suspected of running an unlicensed television.
The TV licenses pay for the BBC, and like with the NHS I think you would find most people are in favour of it. Brits are usually pretty proud of the Beeb (especially when it winds up the current government. I think it allows a more unbiased organisation than corporate owned news where the owners have their own interests. It helps keep the other news organisations honest too (apart from those tabloids, which don't really compete).
- Speed traps everywhere, set to excessively low limits and with giant fines.
There is a lot of fuss at the moment about speed cameras, but the really aren't everywhere or excessively low limits. Speed cameras that only photograph you when you are speeding I have no problems with, you are breaking the law and it only captures you when you are. I think they are less problematic than CCTV cameras in city centers, but people feel they have the right to speed and risk other people's lives (because everyone thinks they are a good driver).
- Cameras monitoring every meaningful inch of public space.
Did you do this one already?
I am a very socially liberal/libertarian US citizen
Something you have to realise is that libertarianism is a very American view point. In Europe socialism isn't a dirty world (and is very, very different from communism or communist countries that called themselves socialist), we regards the US parties as being right wing, and more right wing compared to the socialist parties that get elected here.
As I mentioned, the European countries with the highest standard of living (by most measures) tax and spend more. It certainly doesn't seem evil.
Now none of this is to say we don't have personal liberty problems. There has been fighting over ID cards, we are getting biometric passports, and we had scary anti-terrorism laws that violated people's rights long before it was the in thing.
Culturally though I think people in Europe are fine with higher levels of government intervention and action than people in the US. Some of the things you list aren't things we "put up with" but actually want. If you really dislike this you probably wouldn't be happy here at all.
For the record, I'm from the UK but I've worked in the US, so I've got to see both sides.
Re:Poor article (Score:3, Insightful)
Big utility companies screw up. It happens everywhere. As for the broadband systems being "uselessly fucked up" - I really didn't notice much difference.
Re:Let's review... (Score:2, Insightful)
There must be good, young, telephone engineers in this country. Does anyone know where they work?
Re:Just another self-centered american complaining (Score:3, Insightful)
Culture Clash (Score:3, Insightful)
When I first moved to the US we had similar problems with all manner of things. We had to arrange for a phone company, and once we had one we had to get another one to speak to people a long way away.
We had to take our driving tests again (fair enough), but the test was conducted on a large empty car park with stripes for roads (and then I lost a point because I wasn't paying sufficient attention to other traffic - what traffic, there's only us here!)
We had to buy insurance to make sure that the house we owned wasn't actually someone else's house.
We had to pick an amount of insurance we wanted for our car. How do I know how much insurance I need? Should I be carefully to only crash with Yugos?
The list goes on, but the point is that while the system may be odd, it's primarily my lack of familiarity that causes problems.
Re:I Once Wanted to Live in England... (Score:4, Insightful)
US federal Income tax:
Rate: 25%
Income Band: $29,051 - $70,350
UK income tax:
You were saying? The UK has one of the lowest income tax rates in the developed world. It makes me laugh (and cry) when I hear people complaining about the "high" rate of tax in the UK.Rate: 22% + (1-3% for National Insurance)
Income Band: £2,091 - £32,400 ($4k - 60k)
Sources:i ncome_tax_rates/index/life/tax/income_tax_rates.ht m [adviceguide.org.uk]
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/itax/2004taxrates.asp [bankrate.com]
http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/n6w/index/life/tax/
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/rates/nic.htm [hmrc.gov.uk]
Mandatory, expensive and mediocre health care.
That comes out of of the 1-3% mentioned above. What does your government do with that 1-3%? Invade countries? Build space weapons systems? Subsidise cotton farmers? I think I'd rather have my free health service, ta.
Cameras everywhere
Not sure what you mean by that.
A sensationalistic press that makes Fox look bi-partisan.
Umm... not really. Having read both US and UK papers, I've seen nothing in the US to compare to the Guardian or the Independent. People take as much notice of the Sun and Mirror as they do of the National Inquirer.
Out of control, bureaucratic utilities
BT is the last one, but yes.
Television licenses along with warrant-less searches of homes suspected of running an unlicensed television.
TV licenses pay for the largest (ad free) news site on the web, plus a whole bunch of programs that wouldn't get made otherwise (The Office, HHGTTG, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen, etc). Warrantless searches is bollocks. The TV License people have no more right to enter my house than you do, or the police do, for that matter.
Speed traps everywhere, set to excessively low limits and with giant fines.
Speed traps yes, they are a fucking pain in the arse, but not in their self a reason not to live here. "Excessivly low speed limits" is a bit rich coming from a yank. What's the interstate limit? 55mph? jebus!
Cameras monitoring every meaningful inch of public space.
I guess that's a repeat of No. 2 above. Don't know where you got that from. Don't believe everything you read on slashdot.
wtf does libertarian mean in the US?! I can't believe you put up with the possibility of being shot by the police after being stopped for traffic incidents; a transparently corrupt political system; unrestricted development on a beautiful countryside; blatant society-wide racism; a massively powerful religious right-wing movement; advertising on every inch of spare space;
Now THAT is taking up the arse.
BTW, you wouldn't have been able to live here even if you wanted to, yanks can't get permanent residence without marriage, academia or intelligence.Re:I Once Wanted to Live in England... (Score:2, Insightful)
Mandatory, expensive and mediocre health care.
Health care spending per person in the UK is half that in the US but we still live longer. Our mediocre health care must be doing something right.