Thursday 11 November 1999

Biguoustro stupering spaces masynam defodisc.

meta-date: Thu Nov 11 07:58:00 1999

A quick follow up to my last comment for those of you that don't work for ISPs - I'm not against un-metered internet calls. I'm very much for it if the phone network can cope. The problem is that the average user doesn't know when it's the phone company's problem and when it's the ISP. When windows says "line busy" they will assume that the ISP doesn't have enough lines. Untrue (most of the time). We have never had all of our modems/lines in use and yet we constantly get engaged tones reported. Why? Most of the time it's because a BT switch on the call path is too busy - we never even see the thing. The only thing we can do is bitch at BT (and they are probably going to listen to an end user before they listen to us - we aren't even a customer...). BT then pass then info to planning. Um, hello? Aren't planning supposed to be looking for this before it happens? "Wanted: one network planning specialist 20/20 hindsight essential." Planning and engineering both know the network is underprovisioned - so what is the next move from marketing? To introduce a pricing structure that will dramatically increase the traffic at precisely the points which are having problems coping. Nice one. Left hand/right hand. Foot/mouth. Piss-up/brewery. Oh - before I go: These comments are my personal opinion and in no way express the official stance of my employers - blah, blah.