Bums!
Frosty cobweb
ISPs likely to be even more unhappy as BBC launches live TV streamed over Internet
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We’re used to the notion that most essential services in the UK have a pronounced lean to them, in metaphorical terms at least—just like the famous tower of Pisa, not quite falling down but definitely not altogether right. The trains are but one example, another being the NHS. But can we expect the country’s Internet infrastructure to well and truly collapse, now that the Beeb has made its TV channels available to view live on the Internet? Many Internet Service Providers ( ISPs) would say yes. They’ve been issuing dire warnings and predictions for many months over the impact of the BBC’s on-demand video-and-radio service, iPlayer.
What effect on bandwidth and data traffic speeds will hundreds of thousands of households around the nation have when they turn their laptops into full-on portable TVs?
ISPs have long lamented the introduction of the BBC iPlayer. Ever since it launched they’ve argued that its widespread round-the-clock usage and never-waning popularity together combine to form a very real threat to hog all available bandwidth and slow traffic to a virtual crawl or stop it altogether. It hasn’t happened yet although some of us have run foul of our ISPs for using the iPlayer ‘too much’ and ‘too often’ without ‘just enough’ usage ever having been defined (probably because, for the ISPs, just enough translates to ‘no usage at all’).
People don’t tend to perceive streaming video or audio shows as being downloads to be counted under any gigabyte allowance or Fair Usage Policy, but of course they are. It’s not a particularly ‘out there’ prediction to make when I say that in the coming months you can expect to see more and more people entering into conflict with the likes of BT as customers find their broadband connections crippled without warning or notice, just for having had the audacity to make use of them to the full in ways that are entirely legal.
We will also see a relatively new market sector getting much bigger, offering much the same average bandwidth as today—up to 8Mb if you’re lucky—along with huge data download acceptability of around 500Gb per month, with no Fair Usage Policy, for considerably more money than most current offerings. Such packages already exist and are popular with heavy players of networked games and frequent downloaders of music and video.
When the iPlayer was launched it should have acted as a spur for ISPs to get a move on and work to provide better connectivity across the UK. Instead they chose to whinge, berated their customers for making use of the services they were paying for, called us all thoughtless and inconsiderate, and moaned that they wanted more money from the government or they’d have to punish their customers by charging them more and cutting their access speeds. They appear to be going for the cuts—as in, you’ve gone over your download limit and will now suffer—and not the price hikes, unsurprisingly given that we’re in a recession and every penny counts.
Of course people are free to go to a different ISP when their contracts expire or if they can get out of them—but has anyone else noticed the length of the contracts offered by some of the biggest ISPs are getting longer and longer and longer? The longest I’ve seen so far is 24 months, and while you do pay less per month by signing up for that long a time, is it really advisable to do so? I would say no.
BT is forcing ad-serving and webpage-snooping spyware Phorm on its customer base at some point in the next 12 months, and other major ISPs are likely to follow. Only a handful of small independent ISPs have come out publicly to state that they are ‘anti-Phorm’ but many of these offer data speeds comparable or equal to the big players and do so on month-by-month rolling contracts. It’s definitely worth checking out some of the smaller operations in preference to the gluttonous giants.
So is the UK Internet going to collapse? No. It isn’t. Does it need upgrading? Absolutely it does. Is that happening? Yes. But much too slowly for consumers—who want and expect more than they’re getting for their money and don’t like being scolded or chided—and for businesses, which need the help and competitive advantage faster networks would bring. Increasingly though, independent ISPs are looking once more to be far more attractive than the big players, whose greed and control freakery may yet be their downfall.
He’s turned emo
This song has been doing the rounds for ages. The band are from Lancashire (just like yours truly) and are called The Lancashire Hotpots. They chuck traditional Lancashire dialect and sayings at songs about modern-day stuff like eBay, emos and Dolby 5.1. Band members have adopted names including Dickie Ticker and Willie Eckerslike.
Lancashire, ’tis where ah come frum, tha’ knows. But nay lad or lass, afore thee asks, me accent’s gotten a fair bit softer since ah were a nipper. Thas can blame all time ah spent dahn London fer that, thas can.
The return of Robin Hood? Well no. Not quite. Not yet. Maybe next year?
 Image via Wikipedia
Well whadda ya know. After waiting almost two decades for it to happen, there are at long last some real differences starting to appear between the two main British political parties, if only in how they would each manage the country’s finances in recession rather than in sincere ideological terms (both still love the money men, even though they can no longer do no wrong).
Of course as Labour is the party holding onto the public purse right now, its approach to the nation’s apparent financial apocalypse is the only one that matters for the time being, simply because it’s the only party that’s in a position to put words into action. But it’s nevertheless interesting to see what the Tories have to say just in case they do manage to stop their poll lead rapidly disappearing up George Osborne the Shadow Chancellor’s anus as he continues to preach what amounts to the classic Thatcher and Major 1980s/1990s approach to recession: do nothing, don’t give a flying fuck about the suffering of people and disintegration of small businesses, just let the people bleed and let the market lead.
If Osborne thinks his notional idea of fiscal probity is a vote winner, he’s not only forgetting one man’s idea of truth is another’s lie but he’s also talking up the prospect of turkeys voting for Christmas. Of course they will, because they know despair is good for the soul and if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. There’s always been a little of the sadistic or masochistic about the Tory Party—I’ve never been quite sure which, perhaps both, and certainly both have been evident in the private lives of many of its MPs down the decades. The question for us, the British public, at the arse-end of 2008, is simply this: do we want the whipping now, with no pleasure involved (Tories) or do we want the whipping later, and the chance to buy the sexy PVC outfit at a reduced VAT rate for the whipping to come much later (Labour)? Either way, there’s a whipping on its way. Better get the nipple clamps out, Mabel. And stop the dog barking.
 Image via Wikipedia
It’s very surprising to see the Labour Party dipping its toes into good old-fashioned socialist principles. Tax the rich. Just a little bit. Oh. Oh. That didn’t hurt as much as we thought it would, they cry. Shall we do it again later? Maybe a bit more next time? Me thinks these young preppy nu-school Blair- and Brownites may have just discovered the Joy of Sex. Or rather, they’ve found out they can save their political careers by taxing the rich instead of piling it all on middle and lower-income Britain. If a Tory or Labour MP wants to fall on a sword, all they need do is mention just how great they think Thatcherism or Blairism actually was for the UK. Say what? You’re a nutter, the public will cry.
But of course while Labour seems to be running away from Blairism to great effect in the polls, sensing the post-Obama mood for radical change and starting to tremulously venture into new old territory, the Conservatives are taking shelter in the good old days, dusting down the pictures of their own First Lady of Principle and buffing her up to try and give her old words some new spin. It doesn’t work. She’s of the past and so are they. If only the Tories could actually come up with some new ideas or some old ones that actually sound ripe for refurbishment for the times we live in.
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But of course it was Mags who started this ball rolling (along with Reagan) and it’s been a long time reaching the end. But end it has. It’s odd to see David Cameron and his goons time and again trying desperately to blame Labour for the state of the nation when (a) this is a global recession of unprecedented severity, and (b) Brown surely can’t be blamed for everything, and (c) it’s their own side that first started freeing the markets to wheel and deal and fuck up with impunity. Mind you, it’s also irksome to hear Labour ministers starting every other sentence with, “You must remember, this started in America…”. Never mind who’s to blame. Sort. It. Out.
The media is no longer quite so universally ready to decry the common sense involved in basically taking from the rich to give to the poor. After all, the old lie—put about by followers of that mad old cow who doesn’t know her name half the time these days—was that by not taxing the rich very much at all in comparison to the amount they earned, their wealth would ‘trickle down’ and benefit everyone. Clearly that bedrock of Thatcherism, and later Blairism, has now been exposed once and for all as being a bit, well, rubbish. All the rich did was take, take, take and then take some more. It never trickled down. It collected in stagnant pools right at the very top. And just sat there.
As we continue to spiral downwards into a hole of the free market’s making, in an effort to slow down and reverse that decline (nobody now thinks it can be stopped) New Old Labour—as it must henceforth surely become known—has rediscovered the novel idea of taxing those who earn more, although sadly not yet to such a degree that anyone can convincingly crow about the return of socialism. For that we must wait for the full nationalisation of the banks, as penalty for their (I predict into 2009) continued reluctance to act as banks and actually lend people any money.
But what of the reduction in VAT from 17.5 to 15 per cent? And the other giveaways announced in the pre-Budget report by Alistair Darling? Will you have a Merry Christmas because of the cut and other measures? Do you intend to rush out and spend, spend, spend? Um, with what, exactly? Many of us would argue a VAT cut is only useful if you have money to spend in the first place, and for millions that simply isn’t the case. Yes, it arguably means a cheaper Christmas than it was going to be before today… But next year’s doesn’t bear thinking about, or the one after that, or the one after… Well. You get the idea.
Poem: O Great MachineI pray for you to fall
O Great Machine
that all of this be wiped away
that we may rise again
without your creed
to taste the salt air of the sea upon our lips and tongues
to feel the earth beneath our feet
to hear the starlings calling
to smell the muck as they fold it into fields so we may eat
to see and know the truth and be set free by it
I pray for you to fail
O Great Machine
because you are not my Saviour
nor anyone’s
for you were crafted in the fires of Hell.
“Glitch in the system” excuse for 11 day delay processing insurance claim
 Image via Wikipedia
Returning to the topic of our insurance company, Direct Line, touched upon briefly in my last entry, and our claim under our ‘new for old’ policy for a replacement TV after accidentally damaging it a week ago yesterday (it turns on but the screen is milky white).
When asked why the phone call next Tuesday will be coming from their ominously-named Investigations Department, they told us it was because they’re dealing with an unexpectedly high volume of claims right now for electronic equipment. The inference we took was that they’re assuming all their customers making claims at this time, with the credit crunch happening, are liars. Guilty until proven innocent, I guess.
Yet what we were told and what we admittedly surmise appear to be flatly contradicted by the company’s own head of financial crime, Allan Clare, who when interviewed for this article back in August said that the company has “not noticed any significant increase in claims over recent months”. Unless the situation has changed dramatically since the article was written, which is possible I suppose.
We were told the reason it will be 11 days since making our claim before we even get the assessment process started with another phone interview (there was one initially and I had to go into incredible detail) is because our claim was lost owing to a ‘glitch in the system’.
Funny that. They seem able to take our £70 a month buildings and contents insurance by Direct Debit without any problems at all.
We’ve been with Direct Line for four years now and all we’ve ever claimed for in that time, until last week, was a stolen iPod about 16 months ago that at the time was probably worth around £200. It was replaced within 10 days. The TV, just short of £3,000 when bought in 2005–thankfully we do have the receipt, we’ve been asked for it or there’s no chance they’d pay out—can now be replaced for around £800. That’s what happens. We don’t care. We just want a replacement LCD TV of the same size with the same HD specifications from the same manufacturer, and we don’t want to be waiting months for it to be delivered to us.
So why the bloody intolerable delay? I guess it’s all about the money. The longer they can hold off on paying out, the more interest they make.
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