I can't be the only person left scratching my head wondering what the
alternatives to ADSL are? Surely there must better options than the
current solution. The whole thing seems so precarious. Let's put this in perspective .. here is a rough transcript of some genuine office banter today (the names have been changed to protect the innocent):
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** Steve .. slams down the phone in disgust **
Dan - "What's up Steve?"
Steve - "I've not had ADSL for the last 5 weeks. I have sync - but my download rate is about 3k a second - I can't download my email or load any web pages. A BT engineer has come out and said there is no fault - my provider (not Zen) have said that it must be my equipment - in spite of the fact that I've swapped my equipment out entirely and stripped it all back to the beloved master socket. The very same equipment works on other people ADSL lines. My provider will only compensate me 9 days worth of downtime which only equates to £4 ... and will not help me any further because they think it's my equipment. When I asked for my MAC account, I got put on hold and then put through to an answer phone telling me the department was closed - then I was cut off."
Dan - "Damn that's a nightmare .. they're rubbish. Don't let them rip you off like that. Go to Offcom or who ever regulates the buggers. I'm getting tired of ADSL ... I have my own problems. I jumped through hoops for weeks running tests .. swapping out equipment .. trying to find out if my own equipment was at fault. It was obvious to me that it wasn't as the fault only seemed to happen at night. Luckily for me - an engineer turned up in the day when the fault doesn't happen. In spite of the fact that he detected collision errors on the line he didn't see enough to be concerned and basically said that my only hope was if the service fails totally. I've lost 1.5 Mb sync rate since BT started looking at the fault .. thanks."
John - "So what is your fault exactly?"
Dan - "SNR drops through the floor at night time"
John - "Hey .. I have a fault open for that. It's driving me nuts trying to get anyone to take it seriously."
Andy - "Yeah - you may as well forget it with ADSL. When it all works it's great - but when it doesn't, it all falls to pieces and nobody wants to know."
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Not knocking Zen .. I think that they're a great ISP - but the general consensus with my colleagues is that what is wrapped and sold as a single high tech service is actually a disjointed solution comprising of several corporate entities (none of which seem to communicate very well) running over an old twisted pair.
Surely there have to be better options (and when I say better .. I don't mean greater bandwidth .. I mean in terms of reliability / supportability and stability) ? I think it's absurd that, in order to overcome connectivity issues - people are resorting to things like this : http://forum.zensupport.co.uk/thread/25795.aspx ... Don't get me wrong, very clever of the bloke to come up with the solution - but do we have to do this with other services? When I want to make a phone call .. do I worry about my Seamless Rate Adaptation? When I watch TV or a DVD do I worry about my Seamless Rate Adaptation? When I drive a car down the motorway at 70 mph do I worry about my Seamless Rate Adaptation? But when it comes to ADSL we are expected to *** about with all manner of things - Router firmware - router config - firewall settings - home networking - line filtering - master socket wiring etc etc etc etc etc
Is there anything coming round the corner that means customers are less likely to go through this wretched experience?