Back in the valley of the shit internet connection
It hasn’t taken long for me to get increasingly wound-up at the internet speeds out here in Shitsville, Essex.
I moved out here a while ago to be near one of the MIR consulting clients. We’re doing a lot of work for them and it makes sense for me to be physically located nearby, instead of in Central London, where the internet-eth run-eth over.
Out here in the sticks, nobody cares about internet speeds, not least, British Telecom, who have sold be a piece-of-shit 8mb ‘business’ broadband service that, this morning, is delivering a staggering 34k/sec download speed from UK geographic servers.
The days of getting 1000k/sec+ are long gone, it seems.
Out here in Shitsville, I’m surrounded by civilians, as the phrase goes, using their bog standard rubbish broadband speeds to professionally leech the town’s shitty BT main line internet connection. They’re all running peer-to-peer systems that are great for the individual (“Yes, I would like to download 67gb of A-Team episodes”) but not quite useful for me. Or anybody else that demands FAST internet speed.
I used to stare in horror at my brother’s machine — whenever I visited — to see just how many sodding downloads he was waiting on. I’d shake my head when he’d explain that he just leaves one computer online, dedicated, downloading bollocks from internet land.
My 8mb connection is actually 6.5mb. That’s what the lady told me when I ordered broadband. Because we’re in spitting distance of the exchange, you see. It is 3 minutes walk up the road.
If we lived directly across the road from the exchange, we’d get 8mb.
So we lose 1.5mb of virtual rubbish.
The ‘speed’ of connection is irrelevant to me. 6.5mb — what does that mean when I download a movie from iTunes? Well, in my experience with BT, it means you’ll get the movie sent to you at about 30k per second. Or about 1.8mb per minute.
Which means that your average 3gb movie takes 27 flucking hours to download.
It is ridiculous.
Every time I read about the British Telecom ‘revolution’ — the 21st Century Network — that they’ve reportedly got coming, I smile just a little bit.
It’s a wry smile I do because I know it’s rubbish. Give it 10 years and they’ll possibly have sorted it.
Meantime I’m considering buying a professional-grade leased line for my place. I’ve been looking at getting BT Business SDSL.
£595 setup fee and then £170 a month for a 512Kb connection. Or if you’d like to go nuts, you can get a 1Mb connection for £230 a month. Or 2Mb for £345 a month.
Which I wouldn’t mind paying for, if it actually works. I don’t really want to take a chance though. I don’t really want to blow 600 quid setup and a further 2.7k finding out.
I had a look on the BT site (there’s no cable here, alas) and did a check on my phone number:
I *might* be able to get 1Mb. If I’m lucky.
Has anyone tried SDSL?
I’m seriously thinking of sticking my Vodafone 3.5G dongle into my Apple and using that instead.
