Switch Bitch

Here we bloody go. The bloody internet's playing up again. Sometimes it's bloody dropping out after ten bloody minutes or less, sometimes it can be up for nearly a bloody hour, before bloody dropping out in the middle of something bloody important.
There's no bloody telling.

As regular bloody readers will bloody well know, and be bloody bored of bloody hearing, the bloody culprit is bloody BT. I'm bloody sorry to be bloody posting on this again, but I need to get it out of my bloody system.

BT's bloody wires are bloody old, and bloody soldered every ten bloody yards. Their bloody rural exchanges are bloody Edwardian and the bloody switches are all bloody dirty.

So now I bloody well have to go through the whole bloody process of reporting the bloody fault every bloody day until someone gets the bloody arse enough to go to the bloody exchange to rattle the bloody connections until the ADSL goes out bloody properly. Until the next bloody time.

Alternatively the bloody fault could bloody well be any-bloody-where on the bloody lamentable string of bloody wires from my house to the bloody exchange. So every bloody half baked bloody joint needs to be bloody tested to see if it is bloody OK. Will this be bloody done? No it bloody won't.

Do I bloody well feel like attaching a bloody grappling hook to the bloody wires and pulling the whole bloody lot down, before bloody ram-raiding the bloody exchange, just to make bloody BT replace the whole bloody circus set-up with new bloody kit?

You bet your sweet ass I do.

And the culprit is.....BT

Well, well, well. What a surprise. The fault has been identified by Tiscali broadband support as the BT exchange constantly dropping the DSL signal. For those that don't know but who would care to, your normal home phone line can be enabled to carry two signals, one for speech and one for digital services, like internet. So it is possible to have what appears to be a fully functioning phone line which isn't all there actually, when the DSL bit has gone out.

Do BT self check their own services? No - at least not for broadband wholesale customers like Tiscali or other ISPs. They appear to wait to be told of a fault, which has come in turn from a customer call, and then they fix it - WHEN THEY'RE READY!
They fixed it on Sunday. The fix stayed in until Tuesday morning, went out, and remains unfixed.

Would a direct, private customer have more clout with BT if they bought their phone and broadband from them as well? Well, that's what BT would want you to think. But I object to being corralled down that particular road just to get a service which is akin to the description I was given by the various service providers when I bought the phone and broadband services in the first place. I moved away from BT because of their crap attitude before, so to have to go back.....no, it doesn't sit well, not at all.

The alternative, chucking it in and saying fuck the internet and the horse it rode in looks more dignified than this toothless begging of BT to do what they're paid to do. They are too powerful, and their monopoly on infrastructure service levels must be broken.
Unfortunately we have no direct alternative, not being in a cabled area.
Maybe there's a mobile phone solution that doesn't cost the earth?