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On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Dave Berkeley wrote:
Well, the connection came back up yesterday morning. A total of 55h outage spread over 4 days. That was for a scheduled 10m downtime on Monday. UkFsn tells me that asking for a reduction in the bill is "unreasonable".
It's a tricky situation - you probably don't have an SLA, so no guarantee of service, and if you claim a business loss, they'll claim you should be using a business grade package with backup.. (Enta do offer a 4-hour support fix, but it's £12.75 a month extra!) The best you might hope for is a pro-rata refund, and on a £20 package, it'll be £1 a day, so 4 quid might buy you a pint and a packet of crisps...
Judging by the comments I've heard here, service from all providers is pretty much random, and tech support all poor. It is just pot luck. None of the providers seem interested in having happy customers.
They'll say that over 95% of their customers are happy, so supporting the remaining number is the hard bit - Personally I'm terrified at the prospect of going for the general public as a customer, either ADSL or VoIP, and even if I were to target those who are generlaly more clued up (eg. 'us' and maybe UKFSN subscribers), it's still a huge jump. I don't envy them!
With little to distinguish between the services you are left with price. I'm paying around £25 /month for a landline I hardly use (except to call ISPs when the net is down!) and another £20 /month for my EntaNet account.
Why are you paying BT £25 a month? (I'm guessing your on "Option 3" or whatever they call it these days)
If so, see if you can reduce it to the bare minimum - I pay BT £10.50 a month (going up in April )-: and all incoming calls come in via BT, but outgoing are via VoIP. (Actually, I pay extra for incoming caller ID, but I think that's 75p a month)
The support thing is the concern - Even as an Entanet reseller, I've found their support to be a bit sluggish as of late - whether it's the volume of support issues after the migration to the new platform, or they're just being tardy, I don't know.
I'm still convinced it's worth while paying a few quid more for an ISP that's better than the bulk buy ones, but the list is small - Enta (via a reseller), Zen, AAISP (?), and maybe plusnet at a push...
To be fair, EntaNet did eventually start taking the matter seriously, and from Wednesday kept me informed of the progress.
That's basically my experience too - once they'r eon the case, things will progress - it's just getting over that initial hurdle, going through (or pretending to) their dummy scripts and so on, pushing for a resolution. I have a fault on my own line, but it's so intermittent, that when the last time I tried to get it fixed, I eventualyl gave up as by the time they got round to it, the "fault" had cleared itself. (It's a bad connection and onl manifests itself after about 3 weeks of dry, warm weather - so living in the 2nd wettest town in Devon, that's rare!)
It seems that I can knock around 40% off my monthly bill by moving to Virgin cable (or fibre as they call it), and hopefully get a faster connection too.
Luck of the draw if you're in a Virgin area who was once owned by a decent cable co before the mergers... Find others in your area and see how they rate the service. Speed isn't everything - I'd carefully check the data caps too which is much more important for downloading ISOs, viweing iPlayer, etc.
For back-up I am thinking of putting a mobile broadband dongle up in the roof space, where I hope I can get a better signal. I could control it from a spare gumstix, with power over ethernet. I can PXE boot the gumstix, and NFS mount the rootfs, to control the whole system from my server.
There are mobile devices with rs232 links which will save the hassle of using an extra PC - they may only be limited to GPRS speeds though.
I've used these for examepl: http://www.westlake.co.uk/Cellroute_GPRS_GSM_Fixed_Cellular_Terminal_gateway.htm but only as a phone and SMS gateway.Depends on what you need it for though - emergency email and a bit of web browsing with images off works fine over GPRS, but anything else is painfully slow. (And make sure you're in a 3G coverage area on your chosen network too!)
I would prefer a fixed IP address, which Virgin won't do. But I can always use DynDNS, which would also cope with the occasional use of a mobile backup connection. What could possibly go wrong? Better would be connection sharing between neighbours. Has anyone tried this?
You need the goodwill of them and preferably your own NAT router/firewall to keep their virus laden WinPC's off your nice clean Linux network...
Good luck! Gordon
D On Thursday 12 February 2009 22:11:08 Gordon Henderson wrote:On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Shaun Orchard wrote:In Cornwall it's even worse. The few exchanges that have been unbundled (the major towns as usual) are done by the rubbish pile them high outfits, like Tiscali/AOL/CPW, and a few by Sky/Easynet (the one of two LLU providers I'd actually consider moving to). I think Be (the other one) are in Saltash only. My own exchange doesn't have any LLU either. Fortunately my exchange does have a WBC date (which doesn't appear to be very many in Cornwall) in the very distant future (!)More than mines got! (Buckfastleigh) No target date, nothing. But I always wondered if BT just hate us for the Wi-Fi project we ran.. Gordon-- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html
-- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html