Blog posts have been a bit thin on the ground due to me having poor or no internet again. This year has been a real battle for us to get internet that's usable. I live in quite a rural location still serviced by copper lines put in when home phones were quite new. Both myself and my nearest neighbours are used to a rolling saga of issues every time it rains even remotely hard with bits of the road having to be dug up because of water in the joints. Our line is pretty shallow and several times that's also been damaged by farmers digging drainage channels into the ditch network.
Then there's the ongoing saga of "the hedge"; apparently there is a joint where my neighbours line spurs off from mine under a big hedge. So frightening is the horticultural beast that no Open Reach engineer will tackle the excavation of the thing. In reality a pair of loppers and a spade would probably do the trick but of course it's all health and safety these days - if you can't do a job without spilling your cup of tea it's considered too dangerous to tackle.
For the first five months of this year we had intermittent internet due to something knocking out our internet every night requiring a router reboot each morning. This caused a dramatic reduction in our already pitiful speed due to the service provider pinging the line, seeing the router wasn't on and automatically reducing speed. At one point I had an ever revolving procession of Open Reach engineers up here weekly, each one telling me something completely different with the net result of no change to the problem.
Now you'd think after exhausting every eventuality they'd think of replacing the line, but no. You see it's a tad expensive so we were quoted £50,000 that we must come up with to pay for it ourselves. With my hand on my heart if I had £50,000 the last place I'd be spending it is with Open Reach. We were then told we could apply for a grant from the government, which we actually can't because you need at least three properties out of scope. Plus I don't see why any profit making company with shareholders should be getting public money which would be better spent on schools and hospitals. I'd hate to think of the director of Open Reach having to take a pay cut due to rural customers getting a semi decent service, it would be awful for him/her.
We fought to get onto a partial fibre service, and "enjoyed" the heady delights of 10mbps download and 1mbps upload for a few months before the other week, without warning, Open Reach pulled the plug without telling us. They left us without internet and transferred us back to a 3km long entirely copper line, with hardly enough speed to do anything and going off overnight again.. We must have spent hours on the phone trying to sort it out because of course no one knows anything and everything is someone else's fault. It's even worse we keep getting referred to "look online" when we can't get online. I get very poor mobile signal and the nearest WiFi is a 20 minute drive.
I think the problem is basically money. Most companies are now operated on a profit over customer service basis, it's brilliant if you're in a town and will get the investment in infrastructure, but the dilapidated rural network just costs too much for the amount of people using the service. As technology has advanced the kind of speeds we have currently I can't load webspages with lots of ads and it's also difficult to do something like watch a video. As an aside we also don't have decent digital TV signal here and streaming is out of the question. I do understand we live rurally so have to take the rough with the smooth, however it can be incredibly frustrating because like most people we rely on internet access now to do basic things. Maybe one day it will change but I have a feeling it's only when these companies are forced by law to make things better that they actually will.
Then there's the ongoing saga of "the hedge"; apparently there is a joint where my neighbours line spurs off from mine under a big hedge. So frightening is the horticultural beast that no Open Reach engineer will tackle the excavation of the thing. In reality a pair of loppers and a spade would probably do the trick but of course it's all health and safety these days - if you can't do a job without spilling your cup of tea it's considered too dangerous to tackle.
For the first five months of this year we had intermittent internet due to something knocking out our internet every night requiring a router reboot each morning. This caused a dramatic reduction in our already pitiful speed due to the service provider pinging the line, seeing the router wasn't on and automatically reducing speed. At one point I had an ever revolving procession of Open Reach engineers up here weekly, each one telling me something completely different with the net result of no change to the problem.
Now you'd think after exhausting every eventuality they'd think of replacing the line, but no. You see it's a tad expensive so we were quoted £50,000 that we must come up with to pay for it ourselves. With my hand on my heart if I had £50,000 the last place I'd be spending it is with Open Reach. We were then told we could apply for a grant from the government, which we actually can't because you need at least three properties out of scope. Plus I don't see why any profit making company with shareholders should be getting public money which would be better spent on schools and hospitals. I'd hate to think of the director of Open Reach having to take a pay cut due to rural customers getting a semi decent service, it would be awful for him/her.
We fought to get onto a partial fibre service, and "enjoyed" the heady delights of 10mbps download and 1mbps upload for a few months before the other week, without warning, Open Reach pulled the plug without telling us. They left us without internet and transferred us back to a 3km long entirely copper line, with hardly enough speed to do anything and going off overnight again.. We must have spent hours on the phone trying to sort it out because of course no one knows anything and everything is someone else's fault. It's even worse we keep getting referred to "look online" when we can't get online. I get very poor mobile signal and the nearest WiFi is a 20 minute drive.
I think the problem is basically money. Most companies are now operated on a profit over customer service basis, it's brilliant if you're in a town and will get the investment in infrastructure, but the dilapidated rural network just costs too much for the amount of people using the service. As technology has advanced the kind of speeds we have currently I can't load webspages with lots of ads and it's also difficult to do something like watch a video. As an aside we also don't have decent digital TV signal here and streaming is out of the question. I do understand we live rurally so have to take the rough with the smooth, however it can be incredibly frustrating because like most people we rely on internet access now to do basic things. Maybe one day it will change but I have a feeling it's only when these companies are forced by law to make things better that they actually will.