Even BT at their most optimistic don't pretend to offer that. BT Infinity 2 offers up to 76 Mb/s downstream and up to 20 Mb/s upstream. I think you're confusing your upload speed with the download speed of BT Infinity 1.

You're using an argument technique known as "putting up a straw man". We're discussing the tendency of BT to upgrade exchanges long before they do the corresponding cabinets (which they do), so you raise an imagined case of one person behaving unreasonably because, although his local cabinets have been upgraded, he can't get service.

No wonder you posted as an AC.

Imagine the work which would have been involved if what you are saying was true. They'd have had to dig underground ducting in to everybody's garden. How did they do it without us noticing?

You are right in saying that the bulk wiring - the connections which feed the telegraph poles - are now pretty much all underground. There aren't the masses of overhead wires which there were when I was a boy. The final connection to the houses though for the most part remain unchanged. Yes, new builds are all done using underground connections, but most houses are not new builds.

It would be phenomenally expensive to go around replacing all the final connections with underground ones. They haven't done it, and they aren't going to unless there's a separate reason to do it. Indeed, the poles in our road were all replaced recently, in quite an impressive operation. They carry both power and telephone connections to the houses. To replace a pole they had to disconnect everything at the top, temporarily support all the connections with a crane/platform thing, remove the old pole, fit a new pole, and then re-attach everything to the new pole. Now why would they do that if the connections were no longer in use, or even if they had any plans ever to put them underground?

ROFL. Can you imagine the trouble they'd get into if they did that? The ambulance chasers would have a field day.

Complete nonsense!

Try this - go to Google Maps, pick a residential location at random and then drop in to Streetview. Unless you've picked a very recent housing estate, you will find you can see lots and lots of telegraph poles.

It might be true to say that new developments don't now have telegraph poles, but the vast majority of the UK still does.

This seems to be a common problem. It was nearly three years from when they upgraded our exchange to when they did the cabinets. For the interim period you're in the weird position where querying the rollout information tells you that your exchange is in a state of "AO" (Accepting Orders), but if you try to order it you're told you can't have it. You can't get any projected date when it will be available, because if you go to the "When will FTTC be available?" pages you're told your exchange is already enabled.

I suspect it's a marketing thing - they do the exchange so they can claim that they've got a certain percentage of the country covered, then do the cabinets much later.

That said, having now got FTTC (not from BT obviously) it is very nice. Solid 40 Mb/s (which you won't get if you go with one of these ISPs who advertise stupidly cheap service) is suitably nippy. 80 Mb/s is an option, but probably not worth it unless you have some very unusual requirements.

Did you actually read the article which you cite? It exactly contradicts your claims.

Such a devastating riposte, worthy of Oscar Wilde at his best.

I am reminded of an article I read a few years ago about some anniversary of the invention of the ATM. The American credited with inventing it, explaining how he did it, said he'd seen one in London, and so came home and invented it.

I hope they weren't being charged by the gigabyte for using the hotel's WiFi.

But I'm fairly sure they don't continue running after the test.

Sounds like fun!

Be aware that for a solar installation feeding power into the grid, you are generally required to have a control system which immediately shuts down your solar generation if the power grid fails. This is for safety reasons (chaps working on the line don't want to find there are still unexpected volts there after they've shut off the supply) and because your system will start to go blue in the face very quickly if it tries to power your entire neighbourhood.

You could have a more sophisticated control system which merely disconnected you from the grid and powered your local devices, but that would of course require some storage of power as well because your load would practically never match your generation. The vast majority of small solar installations do not do this.

Some of us have a UPS for our cable (well, FTTC actually) modem and firewall, and another for the computer. I prefer things to just keep working.

I found a while back that GMail started flagging e-mails from my server as spam, even for a business customer who had explicitly white-listed my server in their configuration. Setting up DKIM message signing cured that.

Yahoo on the other hand are complete fuck-wits when it comes to spam detection. I've tried in the past to follow up random spam flagging, and they just give you the runaround. I filled in a complicated form with full details of the erroneous spam flagging, and they responded with a request to send all the same information again to an e-mail address, and then when I did the notification bounced because the e-mail address didn't exist.

The only thing you can do with people who use Yahoo for e-mail is teach them how to look in their spam folders. When they do they'll find lots of other non-spam there too. That's the moment to suggest they move to a proper e-mail provider.

Having checked a number of on-line news sites, the best real-time coverage seems to be on XKCD

I love the way the pages come with adverts for people selling CCTV cameras for the home!