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DizzyKipper
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I would imagine a wholesale and service provider as big as BT would have sourced sufficient if not equal bandwidths on all routes. They also still have the microwave route so they actually have three routes. If ISPs choose not to buy it from them then there is little anybody (other than the ISPs) can do about it I'm afraid.

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Our definition of 'resilient' is the same capacity on all routes. Customers connected to Shetland Telecom network will be experiencing a 5 to 10 millisecond increase in ping. No reduction in bandwidth whatsoever.

 

Well, that's great for them, but I was talking in terms of web access quality Shetland-wide.

 

As JustMe has put it so much more eloquently than I could, Shetland Telecom is only a small niche in the overall market, and by definition only a minority of their customers are likely to be using their internet service during the worst affected 10 hour daily period.

 

The unfortunate thing with Shetland Telecom (as I understand it) is that your averge joe is not really in a position to realistically aspire (especially financially) to being able to access the service anytime soon. Frankly, while Shetland Telecom is a good idea, unless it is made available at more realistic terms to everyone, anyone wishing to escape to stranglehold of BT corner cutting inadequacy is going to find Tooway looking much more attractive.

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I would imagine a wholesale and service provider as big as BT would have sourced sufficient if not equal bandwidths on all routes. They also still have the microwave route so they actually have three routes.

 

I'm long past imagining BT will have done anything, other than if its going to cost them money, then they certainly won't have done it.

 

The fact remains that prior to accessing SHEFA everything through BT infrastructure was getting choked and slowed to a crawl, once they routed some data via SHEFA most folk started to receive an almost "tolerable" service. Everytime SHEFA goes down and the traffic from it is re-rerouted everything using BT infrastructure falls back to the same choked and slowed crawl it was pre-SHEFA.

 

I won't pretend to know whether the reason for it is some inter-ISP petty politics, penny pinching on BT's part or whatever, the results are the same whatever it is. Folk relying on BT equipment for some/all of their service being delivered, may get a connection when SHEFA fails, but there's a great deal of service degradation up to the point of being unusable for as much as approx 40% of each day, which to my mind is no long a service connection, but an outage, as it has no more practical usage ability than an outage.

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Post Office use Talk Talk - much cheapness .....

 

You are on the wind up, right.....?!?

 

I will admit taht I don;t know the financials of the deal, it could be that TalkTalk is more expensive that BT, but the service is better or any number of reaons... PO did not operate their network and still don't so I am guessing that less cost was the attraction to migrate thousands of customers from one network to another?

 

 

Any chance of that in English?  Who is providing the better service, BT or Talktalk?

 

A quick Google reveals:-

 

http://www.information-age.com/technology/mobile-and-networking/2105193/post-office-drops-bt-as-phone-and-broadband-partner

 

That is English to me.

 

TT have their own ADSL equipment in the Lerwick Exchange. They then purchase leased line connectivity to Scottish Mainland. Have they purchaed the expensive auto-backed uo service, or the chepaest available? I can only speculate.

Once the kit was switched on they started to move TT customers from BT network to their own

TT also sell wholesale to a small number of other providers, Such as Post Office.

Any TT users outside of lerwick will still be on BT Wholesale infrastructure, so not cut off, but like everyone else subject to peak congestion.

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Our definition of 'resilient' is the same capacity on all routes. Customers connected to Shetland Telecom network will be experiencing a 5 to 10 millisecond increase in ping. No reduction in bandwidth whatsoever.

 

Well, that's great for them, but I was talking in terms of web access quality Shetland-wide.

 

As JustMe has put it so much more eloquently than I could, Shetland Telecom is only a small niche in the overall market, and by definition only a minority of their customers are likely to be using their internet service during the worst affected 10 hour daily period.

 

The unfortunate thing with Shetland Telecom (as I understand it) is that your averge joe is not really in a position to realistically aspire (especially financially) to being able to access the service anytime soon. Frankly, while Shetland Telecom is a good idea, unless it is made available at more realistic terms to everyone, anyone wishing to escape to stranglehold of BT corner cutting inadequacy is going to find Tooway looking much more attractive.

 

 

 

I would imagine a wholesale and service provider as big as BT would have sourced sufficient if not equal bandwidths on all routes. They also still have the microwave route so they actually have three routes.

 

I'm long past imagining BT will have done anything, other than if its going to cost them money, then they certainly won't have done it.

 

The fact remains that prior to accessing SHEFA everything through BT infrastructure was getting choked and slowed to a crawl, once they routed some data via SHEFA most folk started to receive an almost "tolerable" service. Everytime SHEFA goes down and the traffic from it is re-rerouted everything using BT infrastructure falls back to the same choked and slowed crawl it was pre-SHEFA.

 

I won't pretend to know whether the reason for it is some inter-ISP petty politics, penny pinching on BT's part or whatever, the results are the same whatever it is. Folk relying on BT equipment for some/all of their service being delivered, may get a connection when SHEFA fails, but there's a great deal of service degradation up to the point of being unusable for as much as approx 40% of each day, which to my mind is no long a service connection, but an outage, as it has no more practical usage ability than an outage.

 

Mr Ghostie ...

 

Marvin sells 'Wholesale' , but he can't force Retail' ISP;s to purchase.

 

Granted, no way can anyone commercially offer deals like £2.50 a month and the like. But at least one starts at £24.50 a month. A self help group is able to charge its members even less.

 

Time to get yourself a Community BB Company up and running ?

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Any TT users outside of lerwick will still be on BT Wholesale infrastructure, so not cut off, but like everyone else subject to peak congestion.

 

Which renders TT out of town virtually unsable during peak congestion, when traffic is being re-routed off SHEFA. As BT can't maintain their own out of town customer's service quality on the re-routing service, let alone "lesser priority" customer's customers service quality.

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Our definition of 'resilient' is the same capacity on all routes. Customers connected to Shetland Telecom network will be experiencing a 5 to 10 millisecond increase in ping. No reduction in bandwidth whatsoever.

 

Well, that's great for them, but I was talking in terms of web access quality Shetland-wide.

 

As JustMe has put it so much more eloquently than I could, Shetland Telecom is only a small niche in the overall market, and by definition only a minority of their customers are likely to be using their internet service during the worst affected 10 hour daily period.

 

The unfortunate thing with Shetland Telecom (as I understand it) is that your averge joe is not really in a position to realistically aspire (especially financially) to being able to access the service anytime soon. Frankly, while Shetland Telecom is a good idea, unless it is made available at more realistic terms to everyone, anyone wishing to escape to stranglehold of BT corner cutting inadequacy is going to find Tooway looking much more attractive.

 

 

I know what you are saying and understand where you are coming from. Giving access to domestic customers was not what we were set up to do. The main reason we were set up was to enable ISPs to deliver better services. We have done that and many have (including BT), hence our frustration with some of them for not using it.

 

The Vidlin and Fetlar projects were pilot projects with the aim of seeing if it was technically and financially possible. West Burrafirth have used the model and funded that themselves. 

 

We can't really do much else at the moment (other than backhaul/transmission) networks until the BDUK scheme develops a bit further. It is unlikely that the Council or anybody else will invest while BDUK is claiming 75% coverage of 'superfast' broadband. So we are between a rock and a hard place as far as domestic customers are concerned. That said, Unst, Yell and Fetlar are advancing through the Community Broadband Scotland initiative. They are looking to make 25Mbps+ available to everybody in the north isles.

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Any TT users outside of lerwick will still be on BT Wholesale infrastructure, so not cut off, but like everyone else subject to peak congestion.

 

Which renders TT out of town virtually unsable during peak congestion, when traffic is being re-routed off SHEFA. As BT can't maintain their own out of town customer's service quality on the re-routing service, let alone "lesser priority" customer's customers service quality.

 

 

We have no information on what services/exchanges BT re-routes where when SHEFA2 breaks but my ADSL at home (Bixter exchange on BT) is working well. Right now I'm getting (using speedtest.net) 6Mbps+ (ping 51ms) and my 'usual' (the last time I checked anyway) was about 4.5Mbps (ping 60 to 70ms). Now, this is unlikely to have anything to do with the cable break. I'm guessing BT have renewed/upgraded something in the very long chain from my house to the internet.....but (....am I actually going to say this....?) it's a bit unfair to say that BT's whole network gets kyboshed when their their main route goes down. That said, every time there is an issue Sumburgh exchange seems to get the worst of it so I understand why you say that.. 

 

(And for the avoidance of doubt, it is very unlikely that BT have singled me out for any favours) 

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Mr Ghostie ...

 

 

 

 

Marvin sells 'Wholesale' , but he can't force Retail' ISP;s to purchase.

 

Granted, no way can anyone commercially offer deals like £2.50 a month and the like. But at least one starts at £24.50 a month. A self help group is able to charge its members even less.

 

Time to get yourself a Community BB Company up and running ?

 

 

I'm aware of this, and its my biggest bugbear concerning Shetland Telecom. If the SIC really want to assist all of Shetland and Shetlanders with web access, putting the basic infrastructure in place and then expecting folk to clamber to figure out how they can join in to it, and if they can afford to, simply isn't enough. To my mind its a job half done, they need to set themselves up as an ISP and retail as well.

 

I'm sure Marvin is sick and tired of me saying so, but as I see it, nothing will ever happen if folk keep quiet about it.

 

I'm not expecting BB for £2.50/month, I've never had BB for £2.50/month, I paid £14.00/month since '06 until something over a year ago, and have been paying £25.00/month since then to present. I would be interested in £24.50/month, for a "better" service than the garbage I currently tolerate, but I've yet to encounter one at that kind of money that didn't have very obvious shortcomings for my requirements.

 

Leaving aside the practicalities (expense) involved that the nearest fibre as best as I know is 15 miles from me. I'm not entirely sure I'm in to "self-help" groups, any I've experienced tended to be a den of back-stabbing, double-dealing and folk convinced they were being double-crossed when they weren't. In a council estate "community" with its inevitable high turn over of residents and petty quarrels, I don't rate the chances of one ever getting off the ground in the first place. I'd much rather pay a bit more for a cable run to my door and skip the grief.

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I'm with Ghostie and agree with the points he made re neighbours - I've lost count as to how many have moved in/out over the last few years.

 

Food for thought:  Many local authority housing depts up and down the UK charge those tenants (and leaseholders) wanting access to a communal TV digital aerial.  Couldn't the same be done with SIC Housing but for broadband?

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Any TT users outside of lerwick will still be on BT Wholesale infrastructure, so not cut off, but like everyone else subject to peak congestion.

 

Which renders TT out of town virtually unsable during peak congestion, when traffic is being re-routed off SHEFA. As BT can't maintain their own out of town customer's service quality on the re-routing service, let alone "lesser priority" customer's customers service quality.

 

 

We have no information on what services/exchanges BT re-routes where when SHEFA2 breaks but my ADSL at home (Bixter exchange on BT) is working well. Right now I'm getting (using speedtest.net) 6Mbps+ (ping 51ms) and my 'usual' (the last time I checked anyway) was about 4.5Mbps (ping 60 to 70ms). Now, this is unlikely to have anything to do with the cable break. I'm guessing BT have renewed/upgraded something in the very long chain from my house to the internet.....but (....am I actually going to say this....?) it's a bit unfair to say that BT's whole network gets kyboshed when their their main route goes down. That said, every time there is an issue Sumburgh exchange seems to get the worst of it so I understand why you say that.. 

 

(And for the avoidance of doubt, it is very unlikely that BT have singled me out for any favours) 

 

 

Fair dos, I obviously can't say with certainty that everything BT has a hand in in Shetland withers away to nothing as soon as SHEFA goes sick, without contacting every connection holder in Shetland, I can only call it as I see it from my own connection and the behaviours of other folk's connections that I'm in contact with, and from that all the evidence points to a bottleneck every time SHEFA is off.

 

You may well be right that either by accident or design Sumburgh comes off worst every time in any re-routing exercise. If that is the case it may be a reason, but its certainly no excuse on BT's part, and I'm less than sure that it does anything to show them in any better light, as it evidences a possible discrimination against or victimisation by them of a small proportion of their customers.

 

In "normal" conditions I usually get 1.0 - 1.2 download and around 60 ping on my TT connection at peak times, not great, but "adequate" for my needs. Everytime SHEFA has died, I immediately see ping rise variably between as little as 10 up to 200, and download crash to 0.2 or less, which makes even the most basic pages slow to load if they load properly at all - unusable! I have access to a BT connection, which in the same circumstances degrades by similar amounts, but as its a far faster connection in the first place it still has adequate reserves to cope, or it would if it didn't keep spiking like it was going out of fashion. You click, some of a page bounces right in, and you wait, and wait, and wait until the next spike brings in the other half, or you click, nothing happens, you wait, and wait, and wait, until you all but give up, then it bounces up in your face as the next spike carries it in. A day or so of it you can live with, but as the days drag in to weeks, it gets decidedly annoying.

Edited by Ghostrider
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I know what you are saying and understand where you are coming from. Giving access to domestic customers was not what we were set up to do. The main reason we were set up was to enable ISPs to deliver better services. We have done that and many have (including BT), hence our frustration with some of them for not using it.

 

The Vidlin and Fetlar projects were pilot projects with the aim of seeing if it was technically and financially possible. West Burrafirth have used the model and funded that themselves. 

 

We can't really do much else at the moment (other than backhaul/transmission) networks until the BDUK scheme develops a bit further. It is unlikely that the Council or anybody else will invest while BDUK is claiming 75% coverage of 'superfast' broadband. So we are between a rock and a hard place as far as domestic customers are concerned. That said, Unst, Yell and Fetlar are advancing through the Community Broadband Scotland initiative. They are looking to make 25Mbps+ available to everybody in the north isles.

 

Hi You forgot Fair Isle :razz:

Edited by brian.smith
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