Tag: broadband

Broadband speed test

Utterly unscientific, but who ever you are, please spend a few minutes filling out this form about broadband speed.

You can choose which broadband speed test site you use, and if you have time perhaps repeat the test with a different site (with enough data we can spot if certain test sites report higher/lower speeds compared to others).

You can see the results of the test here: http://snipr.com/ud0h0

No specific reason for doing this, but interesting to see variations in speed based on location/provider/timing, etc.

Anyway, before you forget, pop along to this brief form and add your speed results. It’s anonymous, and you can be as vague as you want about your location.

Thanks

Posted on by chriskeene

BBC News: BT broadband and Tiscali

BT seem to play on ‘the safe default choice for the nation’ image while charging high prices and miking it for all they can. For years they had ‘technical problems’ in letting anyone else put equipment in to the exhanges that got handed to them after privatisation. There were in the strange situation of being the only organisation broadband suppliers could use to provide the connection to user’s homes (due to the previously mentioned reason), setting the price to their monopoly service and also being one of the consumer broadband suppliers itself. Conflict of interest?

And don’t get me started on when they forced everyone on the landline (telephone) rental to move to their ‘line rental plus inclusive calls package’. They did this, they claimed, because most customers would be better off. Great, write to them and tell them so, don’t force everyone to move to a more expensive package. At the time (this was 2002 or there abouts) many third party companies were offering cheap call packages (pay a few quid a month and most calls were cheaper), BT doing this meant people were now paying for one of these packages automatically and without choice, BT’s one, and therefore kill the competetion overnight.

Where was I? Oh yes, BBC News are reporting that BT have written to all of Tiscali’s customers about speculation that Tiscali may be sold in the near future. Now Tiscali are crap, we all know this. And BT and incredibly expensive, we know this too (they play on the fact many people automatically go to them for broadband because they get their phone via BT already). But where did BT get the Tiscali’s customer list from. They claim through a external source. Of course, not through their BT Openreach/wholesale Units who Tiscali have to use for the physcial wires to their customer’s homes.

What is the point of a blog if not to rant (badly)?

Posted on by chriskeene

Tesco broadband : doesn’t like Sussex

UPDATE: December 2008, at last, I can now access these pages from the Sussex campus.

I’ll keep this short. For several years now, trying to access any information about Tesco broadband from the University of Sussex network have resulted in Tesco’s servers showing ‘Permission denied’ messages. (click image to see larger version, shows Tesco’s Broadband page in Opera and Lynx, the latter from a server across campus).

Tesco Broadband shows 'Forbidden' while on Sussex Campus

Before you ask, I’ve tried different computers, different browsers, and accessing it in different ways, and no, I don’t do anything fancy with my browser setup. I’ve tried it on several computers but all within the same building, but as our web requests go via a central proxy I do not think it should be any different across campus. The message is coming from the Tesco servers, a message from our central proxy servers would appear differently.

I contacted Tesco back in April 2006 but came to a dead end: email one explained problem clearly saying when it happened, reply one said “If you go to http://www.tesco.net and then click on the ‘Internet Access@ tab you will be able to obtain information regarding all of our internet access packages. “. Email two thanks them for their helpful reponse (!) and explained that I followed their instructions and the same thing was happening, I also told them that I had tried different computers and cleared my cache (both trying to show I wasn’t stupid and predict their next move). Reply two asked me to ensure my cookies were on. Email three from me said my cookies were, and then it went quiet and no more were heard from them. I guess passing it on to their web team was just somethnig they did not have an option to do, support centres often seem powerless to handle unusal things or pass things on to the anyone in the rest of the company, which always seems bad business sense to me, my query after all was basically a pre-sales query, this is the time you are meant to at least try to look like you are compentent and value your customers.

I mentioned this briefly in another post a while back, and the only thing I could come up with is that we are www.suSEX.ac.uk (i.e. they block access from sites with suposed ‘naughty’ words in them), but just can’t believe this could be the case. Plus, our IP addresses resovle to susx.ac.uk (the orignal Sussex domain) so it looks even less likely.

So, is anyone else blocked from https://register.tesco.net/online (you can try going to http://www.tesco.com/telecoms/ and clicking on ‘Internet Access’ instead)? Or can everyone else access this fine?

Any one have any ideas?

Posted on by chriskeene 2