Most of the cheaper home ISPs go tits up over the festive period, as does much of the 3g mobile network. Consider that people have obtained yet more gadgets (games consoles and smartphones) which often connect to the home router, also it is very common for those who “know something about computers” to be presented with the task of fixing their parents/relatives computers when doing the festive family gatherings. Often this involves downloading updates, upgrading software etc – all more traffic on the Internet…

we are actually “running out of internet” in some respects and the ISP’s are looking for ways to charge Google, BBC etc for streaming media. Its complicated stuff mixing politics, economics and technology, and there is a lot of tinfoil ‘at conspiracies about it but the net is not some endless pool of cheap resources..

Weather does have an adverse effect – due to busted drains, every winter water mixed with gritting salt (and a fair quantity of sewage :yakk:) floods into the Openreach cabling. this can cause it to corrode (especially where it has been spliced) and the cable then becomes a semiconductor and picks up domestic and foreign radio signals which play havoc with the broadband.

Its a complex and expensive job for Openreach to unearth the bad pieces of cable and route the circuit away from them, and they charge the ISP lots of money (as some poor bastard needs to get down the hole after bailing out the sewage) so the ISP tries everything possible to deny the problem. Getting anyone to deal with it involves a fair bit of work such as checking B-RAS profiles, line noise figures and persevering until someone gets their finger out. In some cases its cheaper for the broadband company to lose you as a customer and they know this..

@1984 413876 wrote:

the future of the net is looking a bit scary, think they are going ahead with allowing people to pay for pirority traffic privilages in future. Which has really pissed me off, goes again the ethos of the whole thing.

this already happens to an extent, if you get a business broadband connection or a higher priced residential one you get faster connection and speak to English staff with lower wait times when you need to call tech support.

I first started using the net in 1992 and TBH what has happened as much the fault of the initial idealistic users as any corporates or government. I was trying to encourage my mates in Reading from 1999-2005 or so to set up their own autonomous networks, websites etc during the good times when there was fuckloads of free resources (like companies giving away their old computer kit to anyone who would take it) – they did to an extent but got distracted by drugs (particularly ketamine)..

now no fucker can be arsed with things like this (yes, it does mean putting some effort in, maybe pooling resources to pay for hosting) and even right-on alternative folk are lunching out their websites (over which they have full editorial control) for stuff like facebook pages and crappy mobile-phone quality video on youtube…

My speed test results allways crack me up …

At GL – afaik we allready have an “internet 2” (not sure if it’s fully opperational yet though) It’s just reservered for govenment, unis and businesses like they tried to keep the first one for.

@!sinner69! 415079 wrote:

fiber optic?

I wish :laugh_at:

It’s failtest – allways gives me silly scores when I blatently don’t get that download speed. 😥