Category: Rants

O2: don’t call me to tell me to stop using an unlimited broadband!

Dear O2 Broadband,

I’ve been a customer now for about 3 months. In this time I have experienced:

  1. Spontaneous reboots of the O2 broadband wireless router every 30 seconds, forcing me to put my own router in; support forums are full of plenty of people talking about this
  2. Very slow Speedtest.net speed results of around 1 MB/sec on an 8 MB/sec line in the evenings; I live around 300′ from the Poplar, London exchange (that’s the copper run, not line of site)

Now you’ve rung me to tell me to use my broadband less. Now, I’m familiar with fair usage, but quite frankly, the poor performance of the service is enough to throttle any usage.

So, here’s a couple of tips:

  • Work out how you can not suck badly in the evenings. Ther’s supposed to be a 21CN upgrade from BT for this exchange in the Q2 2010; get some of that roadmap out and publicised as to what this means for your customers? Anything? Nothing?
  • Accept that you have a bad fimware on your routers. Confirm it as a known issue. Apologise for this. Advise people of workarounds. Stop using these crappy Thompson devices. You choose, just don’t keep burrying your heads in the sand.
  • Don’t hassle your customers for using the service they are paying for. You say Unlimited. You say “No matter which O2 Home Broadband package you’re on, there aren’t any limits on how much you can download or upload in a month. So you can use the Internet as much as you like, within reason. Our network’s been designed to cope with people downloading large files (like music or films) and watching video online. But if you’re using the service excessively – like continually downloading large files at peak times – then we do reserve the right to warn you to lower your usage. In exceptional circumstances, we can even terminate your account. This is because excessive use by a few people can reduce the speed that others in the same area get with O2 Home Broadband. We just want to provide everyone with an excellent level of service.” I am not on a 100 MB/s fibre link here, its an ADSL link. It is limited already at… well, you say 8 MB/sec, I see 1 MB/sec. That’s enough of a limit already. Indeed, for central london, E14, less than a mile from some of the biggest internet exchanges in the United Kingdom, how about you actually get some performance in here.

You suggested to me that you may terminate my account; well, you’re offering has performed pretty poorly, so I am tempted to leave anyway.

HP Dreamscreen: time

The HP dream screen is now determined, once again, to use GMT without adjusting for BST, despite having turne don the “US Summertime” option. We still have a dead Snapfish app that sponoesnt show content and spontaneously crashes, and similarly a Facebook applicaiton that, although it shows content, also spontaneously crashes after a few hours.

I am disappointed in this product greatly. It had so much potential. HP, you’ve dropped the ball badly on this. I see Toshiba has a similar device on the market now. Perhaps they’ll produce an SDK and let developers enhance the platform.

HP P212 SCSI card that isn’t SCSI, kind of.

HP recently shipped us a P212 SCSI RAID card; this was chosen for our new Quantum tape drive. After a week of fighting with it, we tried an alternate SCSI card (non RAID) at the suggestion of Quantum, and Voila, all problems disappeared. Quantum claims (perhaps true, perhaps not) that some of the SCSI RAID cards are not implementing the full generic SCSI protocol and don’t handle having non-disk systems on their bus. So, hopefully Google picks up this HP P212 SCSI RAID card (PN: 013218-001) and anyone else struggling with this will see this!

G.E. Handheld UltraSound: from US$250,000 to US$7,000 in 5 months!

Last week I noticed the Beeb had a story on G.E.’s new hand-held ultrasound (story).

Developer GE Healthcare says the portable device, priced at about £5,000 in the UK, is not designed to replace existing machines.

I did a search around and found that it was actually released back in October 2009 (story).

GE has just unveiled this device at the Web 2.0 summit, and they estimate that its cost will be about $250,000.

So between 10th October 2009 and mid February 2010, some 19 weeks, the price has dropped by some US$240,000. That’s a drop of US$12,000 a week, US$1,800 a day, or $75 an hour. Imaging trying to put a purchase order together for one – you just can’t nail down a price. I would guess this isn’t a linear price drop, because in about 10 days from now (Feb 2010) they they would be free!
What will be interesting is when you can rent one for a few months for home use. Wow; wonder what interesting things people would ultrasound? Pets? Tracing the wiring in walls? Injuries? Perhaps they’ll be used by pro-sports players on the field to assess injury?