I got dem broadband blues…
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007I’m in the process of moving ISPs, having been on Broadband for several years, originally on BT then subsequently PlusNet. Plusnet moved my service to an unbundled facility via Tiscali at some point last year for their own purposes.
Technical note- In the telephone exchange, there is the equivalent of a home splitter where the telephony continues on to the phone system and the data is sent off to a rack of broadband kit called a DSLAM, a Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer. Unbundling is when the data gets sent off to an entirely different rack of kit belonging to a Company other than BT elsewhere in the exchange (which BT call an OLO Hostel, OLO being Other Licensed Operator). BT’s 6000+ local exchanges were never designed with this in mind so the big frame where all of the wires terminate is apparently a bit of a mess these days!
I was reasonably happy with PlusNet, getting about 6 Meg download speed and paying £15 a month for a low end 2 Gig/Month package. However, I have noticed that my usage has been slowly creeping up, mainly due to watching such things as 18 Doughty Street TV (which appears to be sick today- the curse of Ken Livingstone!)
Anyway, being a Sky Customer, I can supposedly get up to 16 Meg download speed (although I imagine <10 Meg is the most likely) and unlimited download quantity for £10 a month. The down side is that as I had been unbundled, there are no processes in place to move between suppliers so I had to do a full cancellation and wait until it was stopped before I could apply to Sky.
Anyway, this has now been done and I await my activation date with a certain amount of frustration. It can take up to 15 working days so that is potentially three weeks of being off-net. That is a long time for a Blog junkie!
As a stop-gap, I’m plugging my laptop in to broadband elsewhere to synchronise & keep up to date, but the inherent offline timeshift means that I can’t readily post comments or spend the time embedding links in my blogposts.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…