Well, according to the BBC, more people now have broadband, and a higher percentge are unhappy. The article says:
Consumers, as they spend longer as broadband customers, are likely to become less tolerant of problems
Hmm.
I think it’s more likey to be that the less technically able have started to take up broadband, and had trouble. Of course, if it wasn’t marketed so aggresively, and the tech industry didn’t insist on trying to make something complex simple (and often failing), the poor bastards wouldn’t have so much trouble.
The other issue is cost, and the people that complain the most? The ones that went with the cheap ISP operations. The ones that claim ’16 Megabytes’ in their commercials (clue: data transmission rates are in bits per second, that’s why it’s a rate….). We’re talking Sky, TalkTalk, and all the other assorted shysters. Basically, if you’re a cheap bastard, you’ll get cheap service. A cap on your downloads, bandwidth throttling, congestion, a high contention ratio or even crappier than expected customer service. Somewhere, there won’t be the money.
My ISP did pretty well, according to the TV report. They’re not perfect (Blueyonder/NTL:Telewest/Virgin Media), but for a start, they’re not DSL (which always seem like too much of a bodge for my liking), and overall it works most the time. On paper, you can get a faster connection for less money from one of that assorted bunch, but you won’t be seeing me change lightly.
I’ve now noticed it was on BBC Watchdog tonight, and I missed it. I usually love the chance to mock the afflicted.
I’m also with Blueyonder. Have been since I changed from Demon a few years back. I got fed up with them moving the goalposts regarding their phone charges so cancelled my second line. While I was on to them I also cancelled my additional 70MB of server space (which included access to Perl etc) So I was back to the measly offering of 30MB. Low and behold, Virgin have upped this to 55MB. Pitiful.
But I won’t be changing for a while. Unless of course Dick B moves those goalposts again.
I’d always rated Demon, but never used them: LeeW was with them for years. If I had to use DSL, Claranet are good, but not cheap…
I don’t actually bother with the Blueyonder webspace (apart from the very old, spam-filled guestbook), or their shoddy (but improved) MS Exchange-based email- just the connection, which seems pretty good at the moment. I just wish they could do a fixed IP for home users to save all that tedious buggering about with dynamic DNS.
Fixed IP, I could start serving from home then couldn’t I?
Maybe that’s why they don’t do it.
You still can. That’s what I mean by ‘tedious buggering about’. Have a look at no-ip.com. You can create a domain (eg: hoipoloi.no-ip.org?) and have your router automatically update it to the IP handed to you by BY (most will do this). You can then alias that with a CNAME record in a real domain if you like. What’s more, you’re allowed to, last time I checked the AUP. I stopped hosting public web services from here because of the electricity bills and the site goimg down when I was on holiday.