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Screw you PC World (and HP)

March 24, 2013 wonkotsane Technology No comments

A fortnight ago I bought a new laptop from PC World in Telford. The processor is a little under-powered but the rest of it is great – 8gb of RAM, 1TB hard disk, big bright screen, etc. but it was a good price so I bought it.

Trust Pilot visitors rate PC World’s service 260th out of 265

But only a fortnight after buying it, it’s developed a problem with the trackpad. After a while it starts to recognise a tap as a right click and moving your finger around the trackpad gets interpreted as all sorts of multi-touch gestures. It’s like having a really wonky old ball mouse connected to the laptop with the cursor bouncing around the screen and sometimes just doing nothing at all.

I Googled for the problem and found that it’s a well known fault with HP Pavillion laptops. There’s a possible fix by removing the device driver for the trackpad and reinstalling it which I tried to no avail so I called PC World’s “Know How” people and was told to return it to the store for a refund or exchange as it was within 21 days. So I went to the store this afternoon to exchange it and … well, let’s just say I’m typing this on the same laptop.

Because HP haven’t recalled the laptop for the fault they want to see it happening in the store before they’ll exchange it. I’ve got to leave it with them for at least 4 hours tomorrow so they can see the problem but as it only happens after a period of use and I can’t see them spending half an hour or more solid playing games or browsing the internet on it they aren’t going to see it happen. I showed them all the reports of the fault on the HP website but that doesn’t matter because “it doesn’t mean it’s happening on yours”.

Now, I could understand PC World taking this stance if I was asking for a refund but I’m asking for an exchange. What possible advantage would I get from asking for a non-faulty two week old laptop to be replaced with exactly the same model? None at all so I’m not happy at being told I have to take the laptop back to the store tomorrow and leave it with them. Even less happy at the suggestion that I would have to give them my password so they could log on to the laptop and at being told not to factory reset the laptop.

I’ve already told them that I’ll be after a refund rather than an exchange now if that’s how hard it is to get a two week old faulty laptop replaced because of a known problem and I certainly won’t be buying a replacement from PC World. The sales person I bought it off in the first place was hostile because she couldn’t sell me a load of crap I didn’t want or need and their after-sales service is crap so PC World can kiss my arse, I’ll go elsewhere.

And as for HP – their support website is appalling. I wanted to do an online chat with someone from HP to get some details of the fault and find out whether they’re going to make companies aware of the fault so other customers don’t have to go through the same crap if their laptop develops the same fault. The website wouldn’t recognise the name of my laptop or the model number so wouldn’t connect me to anyone. The drill down list of devices doesn’t include Pavillion laptops at all and the auto-detection plugin that they ask you to install insists on all other browsers being closed before it will work, even though there was no other browser open and the HP website was the only tab open in Google Chrome. All in all, a disappointing experience for my first HP laptop.

Crowd sourcing mobile phone coverage maps

November 4, 2012 wonkotsane Geekery, Technology 2 comments

A colleague showed me an app the other day that helps produce crowd sourced mobile phone coverage and performance maps.

I’m sure everyone’s seen the mobile phone operators’ own coverage maps which are reasonably accurate but are based on maths rather than user experience and Rootmetrics have seen this as a gap that needs filling.

I have no idea how Rootmetrics make money but that’s their problem, not mine. The company has already mapped much of America and is now mapping the UK. Their employees have already driven round London and Hull testing the mobile networks and the gaps are being filled by mobile phone users like me who are running the continuous test on the Rootmetric app when travelling to build up coverage and performance data. The continuous test only works on the Android version of the app, not the iPhone version for some reason (probably a spurious “security” restriction imposed by Apple) and it’s pretty data hungry – the app has used over 750mb in 4 days – so you’ll only want to use it on an unlimited data plan.

The tests produced are a good guide for signal strength at least but the data stats are slightly less convincing which makes the Rootmetric score – a combined score based on signal strength and data speeds – a bit misleading. For instance, if I check my connection speed on the speedtest.net app I can get some blistering speeds for a 3G connection – 9.39mbit/sec one day this week – but the download speed is fairly average using Rootmetrics’ servers giving it a yellow/orange hexagon – which is more a refelection on Rootmetrics’ infrastructure than Three’s. I tether my tablet to my phone at work and at least one of my colleagues tethers to it in the office because he’s on Vodafone and they’re rubbish and it’s good enough to watch live TV on more than one device using the same connection.

That said, the idea of crowd sourcing mobile phone coverage data is a great one and I’m certainly doing my bit!

High speed mobile services coming to the UK

September 12, 2012 wonkotsane Geekery, Technology One comment

Orange/T-Mobile are launching a new 4G mobile phone service under the brand Everything Everywhere (EE), the name they gave themselves when the two networks merged.

4G LTE There’s been a bit of controversy around the 4G roll-out though. OFCOM, which is responsible for licensing the spectrum that 4G mobile networks will use, has given EE permission to use some of the spectrum it already owns to roll out 4G services ahead of the auction for the rest of the spectrum. Other mobile phone providers reckon this is a bit unfair as they don’t have any spare spectrum and EE only have spare spectrum because OFCOM gave them a big chunk for free a few years ago. They thought that was unfair at the time as well but nothing came of it.

Three make a bit of a fuss about the way the 4G auction was going to be run, saying that it gave an unfair advantage to the big four networks who already had lots of spectrum. They have since done a deal with EE to run their own 4G services over their network. It’s a logical extension of the mast-sharing deal they currently have with Orange.

The 4G launch will be an Apple-free zone with only Windows 8 and Android phones expected in the first year and although Apple is rumoured to be preparing a 4G version of the iBrick it might not work with EE’s network.

It does seem a little unfair that EE are getting to launch their 4G network early but while it gives them an advantage at the outset being the only 4G provider, they’re going to find themselves running a network on the wrong frequency with a limited set of handsets as a result. They’ll buy more spectrum in the auction and then spend stupid money running the two alongside each other. This fragmentation happens in the US and it’s a nightmare – you get entire cities with only one operator because the mobile network has been built non-standard and no other operator’s handsets work.

Whatever happens, the rollout of 4G can only be a good thing. Fixed line broadband really has had its day – wireless has virtually limitless possibilities and can provide high speed data connections where laying miles of copper wires or fibre optics just aren’t an option. The only thing that is likely to hold it back is divergence as a result of EE’s early adoption and companies spending stupid money in the spectrum auctions and not having enough cash to invest in building the new networks.

Ten (ish) weeks with hearing aids

April 9, 2012 wonkotsane General, Health, Technology 2 comments

Back in January I had a hearing aid fitted after getting fed up of Mrs Sane complaining about me not being able to hear her finally going to get my hearing tested.

The difference it made was astounding – I hadn’t realised how bad my hearing had got. But it did leave me a bit lopsided hearing-wise because the hearing in both my ears is pretty crap, albeit worse on one side than the other.

So I went back to the hospital a week and a bit ago to get a second hearing aid to balance things up and get the T-Loop added to the one I’d already got because it never occurred to me when I said I wouldn’t need to use it how I would use the phone at work!

The second hearing aid isn’t turned up as loud as the first one because my hearing isn’t as bad in the other ear but I can hear at the same volume in both ears and I can tell where sound is coming from again. The T-Loop is also a great invention – I first tried it in the local Co-op and it was pretty amazing to walk up to the counter and be greeted with no sound other than the voice of the girl behind the till.

My desk phone at work has an induction loop in the handset which means I can hear everything loud and clear through the loop in my hearing aid. Sadly my work mobile (HTC Wildfire S) doesn’t work with the loop but I’m sure they’ll replace it with one that does. My HTC Desire worked with it once but I think the amount of times I dropped it must have broken the loop. Luckily it was due for upgrade so the very helpful people at the Three shop in Telford helped me find a new phone that works with my hearing aids, letting me try out lots of different phones until I found the best sound quality (Sony Xperia S).

There are a couple of big problems using mobile phones with hearing aids. The main one is trying to use a phone without a loop – I don’t have those jelly moulds you see on old peoples’ hearing aids, I have a “tulip” end on my hearing aid which disappears into my ear and is barely visible. It also blocks my ear and if your ear is blocked you can’t hear properly (or less properly than usual). Using a phone without a loop means removing my hearing aid and turning the volume up which is hardly convenient.

The other big problem is using a phone with a poor quality loop. They produce lots of noise – so much noise that it’s hard to make out what’s being said at the other end. The Xperia is great with the loop, giving a really clear sound quality as long as the Wi-Fi is turned off otherwise it can be a bit noisy. The new HTC One was OK but not great.

It’s not easy getting used to hearing aids but it’s worth the effort. Itchy ears are a particularly annoying problem, especially if you’ve got sausage fingers like me that just won’t fit down your ear hole! I find that regular cleaning with a baby wipe helps but sometimes you’ve just got to ignore everything that was drummed into you as a child about not sticking things in your ear and have a good scratch with something blunt.

Another annoying problem for me (and I suspect this will only affect you if your hearing aid is amplifying higher pitched sounds) is what beeping things like the microwave, the oven timer, alarms on TV programmes and the chime on clocks do to the hearing aids. Apart from being very loud, it makes the sound distorted and tinny on the hearing aid for a good 30 seconds after it’s stopped, like it’s been overloaded and it needs to sort itself out. And I can’t even begin to describe what a fork scraping on a plate sounds like.

Despite the little annoyances, getting these hearing aids has been a really positive thing. They’re so discrete that most people don’t even notice them. It doesn’t help me to hear in really noisy places like a hall full of chattering people or a train station but in most situations it’s made a real improvement. I don’t know how fast my hearing is deteriorating – I guess we’ll find out next time I have a hearing test – but I can already sign a bit so I’m well prepared!

Met Office can’t predict tomorrow’s weather but can predict it in 10 years’ time?

February 22, 2012 wonkotsane Bullshit, Climate Change, Technology 3 comments

The British government’s Science and Technology Committee yesterday said that the Met Office needs to spend lots of money on new supercomputers to enable them to more accurately predict the weather 5 days in advance.

Despite being one of the top three weather prediction services in the world, the Met Office struggles to predict tomorrow’s weather. Only a couple of weeks ago they predicted several inches of snow overnight and we got nothing at all. The other day they predicted no snow at all and we had snow. How often have you watched the weather forecast, gone on a day trip and been caught in a deluge despite the Met Office predicting a glorious day?

People have very little faith in the Met Office’s ability to predict the weather and rightly so. The media are slowly turning away from the Met Office because of their poor track record and turning to alternative providers. According to Chaos Theory it should be possible to predict the weather from any event – a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, it’s all cause and effect. The computing power required to calculate an accurate weather prediction based on the small amount of data available is phenomenal though and it’s never going to be possible to get a completely accurate forecast.

With enough technology and accurate data, it would be possible for the Met Office to produce weather forecasts with an acceptable margin of error. But the technology doesn’t exist yet, the data isn’t accurate enough and the costs involved in developing the technology required would be prohibitive.

All of this raises an important point: the Met Office, by its own admission, can’t predict the weather 5 days in advance but they are one of the primary sources of data for the British government’s global warming tax scams. It’s hard to believe that the British government would employ fund managers to manage UK Plc’s investments if they had a track record of losing more money than they made or economists at the Treasury who’ve consistently been unable to budget more than a week in advance so why do they employ the Met Office, who can’t predict tomorrow’s weather with more than 70% accuracy, to tell them what the weather is going to be like in 10 years’ time?

Four ISPs agree to censor internet

October 11, 2011 wonkotsane Come the revolution, Technology 2 comments

Four ISPs have agreed to censor the internet on behalf of the British government.

Sky, BT, TalkTalk and Virgin have all signed up to the agreement to automatically block “adult content”, requiring customers to specifically ask for the block to be removed. The agreement has come about following a report from the religious pressure group, the Mothers’ Union, which said that censorship is necessary to protect children.

We have a reliable way of preventing our children accessing adult content on the internet without state-organised censorship – the computer is in the living room and we watch what they’re doing. Not a very high tech solution but it’s a damn sight more reliable than censorship.

This is just the thin end of the wedge. Today it’s blocking whatever a panel of Mary Whitehouse wannabes determine to be “adult content” for the good of the children (won’t you think of the children, it’s for them), tomorrow it will be what a panel of career politicians decides are “extreme views” and then it will be anything that’s critical of the British government and before long the internet will be censored according to the whims of whichever illiberal clone happens to be in power at the time.

The erosion of civil liberties is one-way, we will never get them back if we allow them to be taken. This isn’t about porn, it’s about the principal of uncensored and unrestricted access to information. It’s not about saving children from the ignorance of their parents, it’s about the state establishing the principal of censorship of the internet. Once you’ve agreed to the principal, the rest is just haggling about the price.

Geek alert … tel: or callto:?

September 25, 2011 wonkotsane Geekery, Technology 6 comments

Time for another geek interlude - tel: versus callto:

Taking WAP out of the equation because it’s so old as to be irrelevant, there are two ways to mark up telephone numbers in HTML. The tel: URI (Universal Resource Indicator – it tells your browser what it can expect to find at the destination of your link) is the official standard for marking up telephone numbers whilst callto: is a proprietary URI made popular by Skype and unsurprisingly, Microsoft.

By marking up a telephone number, it makes it easier for visitors to your website to make phone calls from their phones or computers – click on the link and it launches whichever application is set up to handle phone calls. But the problem is, which of the two do you accommodate on your website? Mobile devices are the obvious target because they’re usually going to be mobile phones so tel: would seem to be the obvious choice but it’s not uncommon for people to have Skype phones or another VoIP phone service so callto: support would be useful.

But you can’t have both so which should you use? Do you encourage standards compliance by using tel: or pander to the embrace and extend ethos of Sky and Microsoft and use callto:? Do you cater for mobile devices with tel: or desktops with callto:?

With the rapid convergence of internet and phones, we need some standards compliance in the major browsers. The last thing we need is a VHS/Betamax or Blueray/HD-DVD battle over telephone number markup standards!

Sky to lose exclusive film rights?

August 29, 2011 wonkotsane Technology No comments

Sky has been told that it may lose its exclusive rights deals with 6 film companies which allows it to show new films first to introduce more competition and give consumers more choice.

This is, of course, what they said about directory enquiries. Before the replacement of the 192 service with 118 number, it cost 50p for a directory enquiries search and it was free from BT phone boxes. Now it’ll now cost you at least £1.75 assuming you can do the whole thing from start to finish in less than a minute.

It’s what they said about deregulating the energy markets and all this competition has led to is increasing bills and consumers being ripped off.

At the moment you have a choice if you want to watch new films when they’re released for TV broadcasting – you can subscribe to Sky Movies or use Sky Box Office or you can wait a few months until they end up on one of the network channels. Ok, you have no choice but to pay Sky for the privilege of watching the film but you’re not tied into subscribing to Sky TV – you can get Sky Movies on Virgin Media and BT Vision.

The truth is, it’s not consumers that need more choice, it’s Sky’s competitors. More competition often does mean better value for consumers but in this case it means more unnecessary cost and less choice for consumers. If Sky, Virgin and BT are all allowed to “share” the exclusive deals then consumers who want to watch all new films as soon as they’re released for TV viewing would have to subscribe to Sky, Virgin and BT Vision. If nobody is allowed to sign exclusive deals with film companies then the film companies lose the money they get from Sky which means they have less money to spend on making and distributing films.

DIY air con!

June 27, 2011 wonkotsane Technology, WTF? No comments

I’m away on a training course this week and staying in a rather nice two-bedroom apartment in an old manor house-type thing (I think it might be Edwardian judging by the windows) on the bank of the Thames with a colleague.

The place is covered with wi-fi which is pretty essential if you’re away from home even if it is barely faster than dial-up. But dial-up would have been an improvement over the broadband last night and today.

The signal strength was fine but the connection to the outside world was dropping every few minutes so I went to the site office to report it. As I walked into the office I saw someone vaguely techy looking standing in the doorway to a broom cupboard filled with servers, switches and wi-fi routers. Ah-ha, I thought, they’ve got someone on the case already. But no, he wasn’t a techy at all and was, in fact, merely holding the door open so that the electric fan that they’d stood in there pointing at the rack could do its job of cooling the cupboard down!

It’s been a rather toasty, globally warmed 30 degrees celsius down here in Surrey and it appears that the broom cupboard they are using as a server room is not only unventilated but doesn’t have aircon either. By the time I got back to the apartment the internet seemed to be behaving so they either threw a web monkey at it in super-quick time or their wi-fi router doesn’t run well when it’s hot enough to fry and egg on it and the fan was doing the job.

Either way, I’m connected to the outside world again and I’ll appreciate my 20mbit broadband at home a little bit more when I get back.

Installing Google Chrome on OpenSuse with KDE desktop

May 28, 2011 wonkotsane Geekery, Technology 3 comments

While I am a political animal nowadays, I am, first and foremost, a geek and I’ve been indulging my inner geek this last couple of weeks by installing Linux on a couple of laptops.

I haven’t played with Linux for about 7 or 8 years so I went for one of the most popular distros. It was going to be Ubuntu but it wouldn’t install on Mrs Sane’s laptop – a common problem with Ubuntu not liking the graphics card – so I plumped for OpenSuse instead and the KDE desktop.

The OpenSuse install went like a dream. The Partition Manager wasn’t the easiest to understand but that’s largely down to me not really thinking about what I was doing properly so I ended up only partitioning half the drive (note to self: remember to resize the partition on the laptop). The second install I did I did it properly – delete the Windows partitions, rescan the disk and go with the recommendations.

I encountered a couple of problems once I’d got OpenSuse and KDE installed which I’ll walk through below for the benefit of anyone else installing OpenSuse for the first time.

Changing your hostname

Figuring out how to change the hostname on KDE was the first thing that posed me a challenge but I found it eventually. The hostname is the name of your computer as it appears on the network and OpenSuse randomly generates one for you.

Here’s how to change it:

Click on the Application Launcher button (where the Start button is in Windows). Hover over the Computer icon at the bottom and then click on Yast. You will need to provide your root password for Yast. Select Network Devices on the left hand list and then Network Settings on the right. You’ll get a message saying that the network is controlled by NetworkManager – just click ok. Select the Hostname/DNS tab and put the new computer name in the Hostname box. If your computer is part of a domain, put the domain name here, otherwise whatever you enter will be the workgroup your computer is a member of. You may need to log off and back on again for the changes to take effect.

Installing Google Chrome

The other thing that gave me a headache was installing Google Chrome. This one wasn’t as easy to resolve as the hostname thing but I got it figured out in the end. If Google want to increase the take-up of Chrome on Linux then they really need to improve the installation process because it just doesn’t work on OpenSuse with KDE. Here’s how to do it:

Go to http://www.google.com/chrome and download Chrome. Make sure you choose the correct installer – you want an rpm package. Once the package is downloaded, open a Terminal window. You need to be logged in as root to install Google Chrome so type in su – root, press enter and provide your root password. The installer package will be downloaded to /tmp so type in cd /tmp. Now you need to install the package – type in zypper – install google-chrome-stable_current_i386.rpm.

During the install you may be prompted for your root password and permission to install a number of packages – enter your password and agree to the other packages. Strangely, the installation package doesn’t actually install everything Google Chrome needs – without the png library, Chrome will load and then shut down without even displaying anything on the screen. To install the png library, you need to run zypper -install pnglib12-0.

Google shuns St George

April 23, 2011 wonkotsane Come the revolution, St George, Technology 8 comments

St Andrew’s Day …

St David’s Day …

St George’s Day …

Now I can guess what the excuse will be – St George’s Day has been postponed until the 2nd of May by the church because it clashes with Easter and Easter is more important in the religious calendar than a saint’s day – but it’s not good enough.

It doesn’t matter whether there is congestion in the church’s calendar, St George’s Day left its religious roots behind a long time ago and is a national day for our country. I don’t care what the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury says, England’s St George’s Day is on the 23rd of April every year.

So, to Google and Asda (who have decked out their Telford stores in British flags) and all the other shops around England that have ignored St George and stocked up on the butcher’s apron, I have only one thing to say: how dare you insult my country, fuck you.

I have Three. Yay!

November 4, 2010 wonkotsane Technology No comments

Talking to a colleague at work about his problems with Orange (pretty much the same we’re having at Chez Wonko), I decided to phone Orange again to see what the score was following my phone call on Saturday. The person I spoke to actually seemed to be doing something so thinking I was on a roll I decided to phone Three again.

The colleague in question had sent me a link to a website that said Three were opting out of network sharing with Orange in areas where they had good coverage. Three think they have good coverage here which is why they turned a mast off so maybe they’d opted out of network sharing where I live? They haven’t but the person I spoke to said “we don’t want you to leave us, let me see if we can fix your problem”.

What have I got to lose? I’m waiting for Mrs Sane to sort out Orange so we can change networks together and like I said on Saturday, if Orange sort out their problem I don’t necessarily need to change networks.

Imagine my surprise when I looked at my phone this morning and it was on Three. Not only was it on Three, it had a full signal. They phoned me today and said they’d changed something at the mast so that I would get coverage while they sorted out another mast for the area which should be operational in about 3-4 months time.

Sorted!

Orange admits to 69.5% failure rate on mobile phone mast

October 30, 2010 wonkotsane Technology 5 comments

The Orange rip-off saga continues unabated. I eventually got Orange to disconnect my phone after a prolonged battle with customer services eventually got me talking to their network support people. But I haven’t escaped Orange yet.

When I left Orange I changed to Three and it all went well for a couple of months until Three decommissioned a mobile phone mast near my house and left me unable to get a Three signal in my house. And when you can’t get a Three signal, your phone roams onto Orange. Same shit service at home, different name on the bill.

Orange, in their infinite wisdom, decided to turn off one of their masts a week later even though they’d already acknowledged a few months earlier that the network was congested. If your car is running on 3 cylinders, you don’t take another spark plug out … unless you’re Orange.

Mrs Sane is still on Orange and tearing her hair out since they turned the mast off. Since that weekend the pattern is the same – about lunchtime on a Friday you can’t make and receive phone calls or send and receive texts with any degree of reliability. Most of the time it’s not possible to use the phone as a phone which is a bit inconvenient. This goes on until Monday morning.

Mrs Sane complained to Orange and they agreed to release her from her contract if she wrote in to their head office. She wrote in to their head office and I put a letter in the same envelope for #1 son’s phone which is also on Orange. I haven’t had a reply but Mrs Sane got one denying there was a problem and insisting that their networks people said there is no problem.

The level of service is unacceptable. I provide 24 hour cover for work every other week and the on-call phone is on Orange. The last two times I’ve been on call I’ve had to give my house phone number to my employer because the mobile phone doesn’t work. Mrs Sane can’t use her phone and neither can #1 son. I can’t use my Three phone because roaming connections are dropped off first and neither can #2 son who’s also on Three. My brother-in-law says that whenever he comes to Telford – and particularly where we live – he has the same problem.

Things came to a head today when Mrs Sane and I were trying to call each other this morning and couldn’t so I phoned Orange to complain again. Five times. It took about 30 or 40 attempts to make the five calls. The first time a supervisor was going to call me but didn’t. The second and third times I got cut off while I was on hold. The fourth time I asked to be called straight back on my landline because I kept getting cut off but nobody called. The fifth time I asked to be called back on my landline while I waited on the mobile and when they called me I didn’t bother wasting time explaining myself again and insisted on being put through to a network support person.

To my surprise I was put through to a network support person who was very helpful. He checked the repeater mast at the end of our road and found that it was a bit poorly. Well, when I say a bit poorly, what I mean is absolutely buggered. The connection failure rate on that mast yesterday was 69.5%. You haven’t read that wrong – 7 out of 10 attempts to connect to the network to make or receive calls, send or receive texts or use data resulted in a failure. That is amazingly bad – a critical failure rate according to the networks person at Orange. But according to Orange head office, there’s nothing wrong!

The nice networks man raised a ticket for an engineer to go and check it out next week. He said it’s a line of sight repeated and it may have lost sight of a proper mast (the one they’ve turned off perhaps?) or just not be up to the job and needs cabling up instead.

It’s understandable that the first line support people don’t have access to that sort of information because they wouldn’t know what to do with it but it shouldn’t be so damn hard to get through to someone who can check out that sort of thing and deal with the problem accordingly. I really hope they can sort the problem out because if I can get a reliable Orange connection at home, that means I don’t have to change from Three who I’m still really happy with, lack of connectivity at home notwithstanding.

Orange should have known there was a problem because that level of failure is just ridiculous but the big problem is people just accepting shit service and not reporting it. If everyone who had a problem – and there are a lot of them – reported it they would have been more likely to have spotted a problem before now.

I’m not convinced that they’re going to fix the problem – certainly not in the short term – but let’s see what they say next week. I am assured that I will have a phone call by Thursday at the latest to give me an update.

Help me choose: O2 or Vodafone

October 4, 2010 wonkotsane Technology 7 comments

I’m beginning to think we’re jinxed when it comes to mobile phones.

Last week I posted about the dilemma I have now that Three have turned off the mast closest to my house. I left Orange because it was so unreliable so staying on Three when I can only pick up Orange on my Three phone is no good and T-Mobile doesn’t work in my house.

Well now it’s becoming more of a pressing issue because Orange have also just switched off a mast and you’ve guessed it, it’s the mast nearest my house. Getting an Orange signal isn’t a problem but making and receiving calls and sending and receiving texts is a problem and data connections are a rarity because the already overloaded Orange network is now maxed out all the time.

So in a nutshell, I’ve got a choice between O2 and Vodafone. I’ve been asking on Twitter and Facebook and so far pretty much everyone has said Vodafone. O2 are apparently having the same capacity problems as Orange and T-Mobile. But what about Vodafone? Everyone can’t be happy with Vodafone otherwise there’d be nobody on the other 4 networks! Their data allowances are rubbish, as are their upgrades but what about the network?

The coverage checkers for O2 and Vodafone both show reasonable coverage for where I live – not as good as Orange, T-Mobile or Three – but there’s not much difference between the two. So it’s just down to reliability, customer service and value for money but which one should I choose? O2 or Vodafone?

A Dilemma

September 25, 2010 wonkotsane Customer Services, Technology 3 comments

A couple of months ago I achieved a small personal victory against Orange who finally admitted that their network is struggling and terminated my contract early. They’ve since agreed to pay me a quite reasonable amount of compensation for unreasonably keeping me in contract when they knew they couldn’t provide me with the service I was paying for.

So I changed to Three for a number of reasons, foremost of which was the value for money and the superior coverage. For £32 per month I get a free network unlocked HTC Desire, 500 minutes of any network calls, 1000 minutes of Three to Three calls, 1000 texts, 120 MMS messages and 1gb of data. On the coverage front, I get Three’s network which provides relatively patchy coverage nationally (but fine in the places I frequent regularly) and roaming access to voice and data on Orange – the largest combined coverage of any UK mobile network.

I have been more than happy with Three right up until last Saturday when my phone would no longer connect to Three and was stuck on roaming. I assumed it was a local problem and after a few hours called Three to confirm they were aware of the problem. They said there was no problem, it must be the phone and I should turn it off and take out the sim card, leave it for a few minutes and try again. I left it overnight to see if the problem went away by itself but it didn’t so I tried what I was advised to do and that failed to fix the problem.

So I called again and was told it must be my phone and that there is a known problem with the HTC Desire that can cause it to latch onto a roaming network and be reluctant to move back to the home network. I was told to take my phone to a Three or Carphone Warehouse shop and get it flashed to the latest version of the software under warranty. The phone had updated that morning so I knew it was up-to-date but I reluctantly agreed to do as they said. But later that day I went to a relative’s house and as soon as I travelled away from home, the phone picked up Three again. ”Ah-ha”, I thought, “that proves it’s the network”.

So when I got home I checked #2 son’s phone which is also on Three and his had the same problem. I manually scanned for networks and it would only pick up Three on 2G – scanning with the phone set to 3G wouldn’t pick up Three at all. So it’s definitely the network, without a doubt and I phoned Three back up again. The person I spoke to this time told me that the mast by my house had been decommissioned and that they were currently working on the next nearest to upgrade it to take up the slack from the decommissioned mast. This would take a couple of days, he told me.

Being a naturally suspicious person, I decided to go to the Three shop in town and check it out the following day. I went, they checked and confirmed that what I was told was correct. Brilliant, it’s not my phone and I just need to sit tight for a few days and it’ll be sorted. Except it isn’t sorted because my phone still roams onto Orange as soon as I turn into my street and it’s been a week. I called Three today to find out if the upgrade had been finished on the other mast – yes it has and there are no problems with any of the masts in my area. You know what’s coming next don’t you? I did and I sighed.

The handset faults person asked me for my software versions again and told me that I didn’t have the latest version. I disagreed. So did he. He told me it was my phone and I needed to get it flashed. I told him it wasn’t my phone and explained all the above again and asked him if he genuinely thought that it was all a co-incidence and that two different models of phone had spontaneously developed the same fault which only manifests itself in my street and started when they turned off the mast near my house? He said it could be. Clearly it isn’t. This is what I do for a job – I diagnose and fix application infrastructure faults for a multinational IT company.

The aforementioned handset faults person got his supervisor to phone me back and we went through it all again. He didn’t try and blag me the like his colleague did though and agreed that it was Three’s fault. He offered me a different handset or to terminate my contract without charge. As I’ve already proven it’s not the handset with #2 son’s phone, the only option is to terminate the contract and go elsewhere.

But here’s the dilemma: my phone works in the house, it just can’t get a Three signal so it roams onto Orange. If I’m on a call when I turn into the street it invariably cuts me off as it tries to keep the Three signal for as long as possible and ends up cutting me off because it’s too late to switch the call to Orange. And I came off Orange for a reason – the network is overloaded and unreliable. But I won’t get the deal I’ve got from Three if I go to another network – I won’t get the data, the free calls or the coverage.

Obviously Orange is out of the question so that leaves me with T-Mobile, O2 or Vodafone. We’ve dabbled with T-Mobile and it was nothing special and then they built a new mast at the end of the road and the signal nosedived to the extent that it often wouldn’t work indoors. So that leaves O2 or Vodafone. Having worked for a mobile phone dealer, I know that Vodafone’s upgrades are shit – you have to spend quite a lot of money with them to get a decent upgrade when your contract is up so that leaves O2. But O2 have overloaded their network with free data packages to the extent that their network in London was pretty much knocked out earlier this year for weeks.

So now you see my dilemma, what should I do?

Stop buggering about with my internet!

August 29, 2010 wonkotsane Customer Services, Technology No comments

Bloody buggering Sky, I swear there’s a conspiracy to piss me off.

Two months ago they buggered up my internet connection and then buggered up my phone fixing my broadband. Cartman Pissed Off I spent several days arguing with them over the phone that the problem was at the exchange, not my equipment or my phone, the micro filter or the socket. Eventually I got through to someone sensible in their higher level support department who did the unthinkable and didn’t follow the step by step instructions that clearly had no relevance at all to the problem I had and eventually got the problem sorted at the exchange. I managed to figure out the problem despite being in a hotel on a training course but it took several days of phone calls for Sky to catch up with all their gadgetry.

So they fixed my broadband by moving my line from one switch to another and in the process paired my phone up to god knows where, but it wasn’t my phone line! As compensation fro dicking me around entirely unnecessarily, ballsing things up twice and costing me quite a lot of money in phone calls they knocked a fiver a month off my bill for a year. Which they also cocked up, resulting in my getting billed for two half price phone lines instead of one.

Anyway, they sorted all that out and everything was fine until yesterday when we got back from a week’s holiday to find that the internet wasn’t working. There was no heartbeat light on the micro filter (I bought an expensive filter a while ago which tells me when it’s connected to the exchange) and the data light on the router was red which kind of suggests that there was no connection to the exchange. So I did some tests, including trying a spare router which they sent me when there was nothing wrong with my router two months ago.

Eventually they figured out that there was a problem and phoned me back to tell me they’d fixed it. So I asked what was wrong and what they’d done to fix it. There was a pause and a reluctant explanation: they’d done some tests on the line and discovered that it will only support 10mbit/sec so they’d reduced the connection to 10mbit.

Interesting. So my line has supported a connection at over 20mbit/sec for over a year but suddenly, in the space of a week, my line has mysteriously degenerated to the point where it will now only support half the data rate it did before I went on holiday. Is there an explanation? Well, the maximum speed is calculated from the distance from the exchange, the line quality and the quality of the wiring at home. All of which I know and that’s how I know their maths doesn’t add up. According to Kitz, at 900m from the exchange with 13dB downstream attenuation, I should be be able to connect to the exchange at 22mbit/sec with a throughput of just over 20mbit.

As the crow flies I am less than 400m from the exchange so the actual length of cable is probably somewhere between the 0.4km distance from the exchange and the 0.9km they estimate. Regardless, the LLU speeds quoted above are pretty much spot on what I’ve been getting for over a year and nothing has changed. The router is still plugged into the master socket with no extensions and a high quality micro filter.

Anyway, they said that it will take up to 24 hours to put the speed back to 20mbit (5 minutes to reduce it, a day to increase it … hmmm). Needless to say, 24 hours later it’s still connected at 8mbit – not even the 10mbit I was told yesterday that my line could support. Not a happy bunny as you can imagine so I phoned again, went through the same conversations and had another promise to put my connection back to 20mbit.

I pay for 20mbit, my line supports 20mbit, I expect 20mbit! I suspect another battle may be in the offing, let’s see what happens tomorrow.

Google UK in Spanish?

August 14, 2010 wonkotsane Technology One comment

Oh dear, looks like the fuck up fairy has visited Google!

Orange admits their network is over capacity

July 26, 2010 wonkotsane Customer Services, Technology 5 comments

For the last few months the service I’ve been getting on my Orange mobile phone has been getting progressively worse.

A few months ago I couldn’t make phone calls at all for about half a day and nor could I receive any. #1 son’s phone was the same, so was Mrs Sane’s and so was the work phone I had – all on Orange. All the phones had a full signal but they wouldn’t make or receive calls.

I called Orange off my landline (an expensive call) and they couldn’t tell me what the problem was. The work phone came back on before our personal phones – to be expected, they use QoS on their network. But this was the first indication that something was going seriously wrong with Orange’s mobile phone network.

Since that time, the service has become increasingly poor. When trying to make outgoing calls I would often get connection errors, network busy messages or just simply timing out without making the call or displaying any errors. This could happen with a poor single or with a full 2.5G signal. I took Orange’s advice to change the phone from 3G to 2G temporarily and this improved the service greatly but I use a lot of data so it wasn’t a proper answer to the problem and when it started happening even with 2G manually selected, I decided enough was enough.

Over the past few months I have spent hours on the phone with Orange trying to get to the bottom of this problem. Several times I told them that if they couldn’t fix the problem it was fine but that I expected them to end the contract early so I could change to another provider. That’s pretty much where the sympathy ended and I had some interesting conversations with people at Orange about this. During one call I was told that there was no real difference between 2G and 3G data connections – in reality it’s between 1.8mbit/sec and 3.6mbit/sec, depending on the state of the network where you are. On another call I was told that it was impossible for Orange to cancel my contract early and when I pointed out many times that the terms and conditions they continuously quoted at me as an excuse to keep taking my money without providing the service I was paying for said that they could, in fact, cancel my contract whenever they wanted for whatever reason they wanted, the woman hung up on me.

The problems happened mainly in busy built up areas, generally not rural or sparsely populated areas. It also generally happened during the day, not at night. I’m not a mobile phone network engineer but I’m a pretty techy person (alright, I’m a geek) and over the last few years I’ve gained quite a lot of knowledge and experience of networks and communications infrastructure. To me the cause of the problem was pretty obvious – not enough capacity – but trying to get someone at Orange to admit that their network wasn’t able to cope with demand was a seemingly impossible task.

But it wasn’t impossible because, with the help of a couple of nice men from Orange’s off-shore call centre in India, I managed to get a call escalated to Orange’s networks department and on Saturday a very helpful man from Orange called me, discussed my problems and agreed that it was lack of capacity on the network and that it couldn’t be fixed. He agreed that the iPhone was the trigger that has brought the network to its knees just as it has done with O2 and said that it may get better when they start merging their network with T-Mobile in a year’s time but they just don’t know at the moment.

It was a refreshingly honest admission from Orange and they agreed to end my contract immediately, allowing me to change providers. Co-incidentally, there was an announcement on our company intranet today that Orange have come clean to my employer about their network problems and staff are even being offered second phones on a different network by the company where problems are particularly bad. It may just be a co-incidence but could my call on Saturday have been the trigger for an open admission by Orange that their network is basically buggered?

Google stands up to China

January 13, 2010 wonkotsane Technology No comments

Google appears to have finally found some balls and has told the Chinese government that it is no longer willing to censor search results.

The announcement – and the associated threat to pull its operations out of China altogether – was prompted by the hacking of two Google email accounts used by Chinese human rights activists. Google hasn’t specifically pointed the finger at the Chinese authorities but that is obviously what they are implying.

One of the conditions on Google being allowed to operate inside China was that it would censor search results on behalf of the Chinese government. China restricts internet access severely and websites that they don’t approve of are blocked very quickly. I tested the response of the Chinese censors once by posting something about Tibet with a picture of the Tibetan flag here on Wonko’s World and then checked the Great Firewall of China website regularly which allows you to check if a website is accessible in China via proxies. This blog was blocked within hours.

At the time, Google was criticised heavily for caving in and meeting the demands of the Chinese censors. But I wonder now whether Google had a long term plan to establish itself in China, to become a dominant and recognisable brand in China as indispensible there as it is elsewhere around the world and then to start using that influence to try and end China’s censorship of the internet.

I would like to think that it was all part of a big plan but I guess we’ll never know. Either way, it’s good to see that Google has finally got some balls.

The Future’s Bright, the Future’s … expensive

November 20, 2009 wonkotsane Customer Services, Technology One comment

I was on the phone to Orange customer services today to see if there was a cheaper way of getting my son a small amount of internet access.

I was disappointed to find that not only was £5pm the cheapest option for data, but new customers would only receive 250mb for their £5pm, rather than the 500mb limit that has been available until recently. I was considering adding the data to Mrs Sane’s phone package but 250mb for £5 is even worse value than the already poor offering of 500mb.

I assume that Orange is aware of other networks’ offerings and how Orange compares to them. Let’s have a look at what’s available elsewhere:

Vodafone charges £5pm for 500mb – double the new allowance you get for the same price with Orange.

O2 charges 50% more than Orange but in return for the extra £2.50 you get unlimited data unless you have an iPhone or a 600 minute package or above in which case you get free unlimited data and unlimited access to their network of wi-fi hotspots.

T-Mobile offers unlimited data for £5pm and Three even gives 100mb per month free with a £10 pay as you go top-up as well as free Skype to Skype calls!

This is a backward step from Orange and as I said, disappointing. I’ve been an Orange customer for 13 years and recommended it to many, many people over the years. I even had a job selling Orange mobile phone contracts a few years ago!

The high cost of data on Orange is a real let down and after visiting a Three shop yesterday and seeing how cheap their packages are I think I know where I will be going when my contract is up. With a roaming agreement with two networks, their poor coverage isn’t a problem any more and most new phones are available on Three so it all comes down to price. For a £10 pay as you go top-up you get free Three to Three calls, free Skype to Skype calls and 100mb of data as well as 50 minutes of voice and 100 texts. Contracts are even better value.

Orange has the resources to match that offering but refuses to do so. It’s a shortsighted move that’s cost them an extra bit of business from me yesterday and when my other 3 contracts with Orange are up next year it’s probably going to cost them those too.

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