The chronicle of my (not failed) attempt to get BT Broadband installed

I don't seem to have much luck with telecom companies. Every time I move house I seem to end up in the twilight zone and this move has been no exception.

I own two properties a flat and a house. The flat had BT Broadband, the house Virgin Media cable. Virgin are using traffic shaping which means that if you stream a movie for more than an hour in the evening they cut your speed from 20 mbit to 1.5 mbit and the film starts buffering. This was not the case with my BT ADSL at the flat which was always a steady 12 mbit. The Virgin modem was also at the wrong end of the house and needed moved. As I was not using the internet at the flat I decided to move the BT service to the house, get the router in the right place and then discontinue Virgin at a future date. Nothing difficult in this as there as already a disused BT socket in the correct place in the house and it was in use until quite recently as a business line.

When I placed the order BT wanted to charge a reconnection fee, but offered free connection if I switched to Infinity. I As Infinity 2 was only £2 more than my current monthly bill I decided to go for this upgrade and placed the order on 31st January.

Here is how events have unfolded since then:

31st January
Placed order via BT web site.

13th February 
Router arrived in the post. It would have fitted through the letterbox, but postman rang the bell. Unusually I was in. Just as well.

14th February
Engineer arrived.
Got service working to the cabinet, but was unable to find a circuit that was working between the cabinet and the pole outside the house. Had to refer it to another type of engineer.

18th February
Phoned BT.
Told it would be completed on 20th, engineer to call between  1pm and 6pm.

20th February
Engineer came, put a tracer on, took it away again. Still no service.

21st February
Phoned BT
Told that engineer would call on  the 24th to complete the installation. Was promised one month free as compensation plus credit on my bill for the days the service was not active.

24th February
1:57 text to say there was a delay due to engineers dealing with storm damage and engineers visit was cancelled
2:30 I went out
2:45 Engineer put card through door to say he had come.

I think this was the point where their provisioning process could no longer cope with my situation.

I phoned and was promised an appointment at a time that would suit me. I said that Friday 28th was the only time I could do.

26th February
Call from India saying engineer appointment would be Thursday 27th. Apparently the Friday was impossible for some reason. The person did not understand my previous agreement with BT about this.
I reluctantly accepted the Thursday 27th appointment on the basis that this would be it finally fixed. BT confirmed this by text and email to me:

Hello - This is a message from BT. This is to confirm the engineering appointment to install your broadband service is on 27/02/2014. Your order reference number is VOLxxxxxxxxxxx  Thank you for choosing BT

27th February
Engineer did not turn up.
Logged into bt.com order tracking system and it said appointment was for 13th March!

Phoned BT and they confirmed that email and text refering to appointment on 27th had been sent in error. I complained and issue was escalated to a manager. They said they would contact me between 8am and 8pm on Friday 28th to arrange a specific time for an engineer so I would not have to take time off work again.

28th February
No call from BT.


It is now 15 days past the original installation date and I still have no broadband.

I will update this article as the story unfolds.

1st March
Called BT, they said they had been unable to contact me by phone. Arranged appointment for Tuesday 4th March.

4th March
Checked online and appointment listed for today between 1pm and 6pm. However, activation not scheduled until 13th March, which will be four weeks since the original activation date.

4th March
Engineer called at 1:45pm to say there were no notes so could I explain. I explained the whole story. He came round and tested it and it was all working at 68mbps. He didn;t see any reason for a 13th march activation date so he got me to  I plug the router in and do the initial sign on.

It has never given me more than 25mbps. It has varied a bit during the settling in process and is currently:


BT Infinity 2 speed
down - 21.05    up - 18.83

Compared to my other line:

Virgin 20mbps speed
down - 19.14       up - 1.11

However, there is no traffic shaping in force so I can stream movies no problem in the evening.

The speed issue is probably down to the poor overhead wire quality. I am not sure I have the energy to argue with BT at the moment over this. I may take it up in the future as from reports I have seen there are few people getting less than 50mbps on Infinity 2.


8th March
Contacted by BT Care who had seen my tweets and offered direct help to resolve it which I intended to follow up with on Monday 10th.

9th March
Sunday night and watching iPlayer. The home hub failed, orange flashing light, then rebooted itself.

10th March
Tested the speed and was getting 74 mb/s download and 18 mb/s upload.

As the problem has resolved itself for now I have responded to BT that it is fixed.


Overall Results
Even at the lower speed I was not getting any reduction in speed when streaming movies. I have been able to use Netflix, Lovefilm and iPlayer on full HD without any buffering at any time I wanted to (using Xbox 360 through a wired ethernet connection). This is a huge improvement over Virgin Media cable. I have also had fewer problems connecting to XBox Live.

Churches in Edinburgh on the Internet

Just a quick statistic on the visibility of churches on the internet in Edinburgh.

I did an incognito search on Google today (meaning that Google ignored my previous search history and location) for "church in Edinburgh".

The first page of results (ignoring review links for two Church of Scotland churches which are tourist attractions) were:

Church of Scotland congregations - 1
Independent churches of various kinds, mainly charismatic - 6

The second page results were:

Independent churches - 4
Episcopal churches - 2
Roman Catholic churches - 1
United Reformed Churches - 1

My thoughts on this are that it reflects the age range of the people attending these churches. The older generation don't really use the Internet to the same extent as the young. These are also the growing churches that are actively seeking new members so they have a need to advertise.

Some useful online DNS tools

When I recently moved a few domain names from my web hosts name servers to my domain registrar's (Enom) I found these good online tools for checking the validity of DNS zone files and their propagation:

• Simple online dig tool from Geektools - One of the oldest online DNS tools, but still very useful.
• A slightly more complex one - From Ring of Saturn which allows you to add the same commands as the command line dig tool.
• Nexcess Global DNS Checker - Allows you to see how your DNS changes are propagating around various ISP's name servers.

And finally:

• Centralnic Domain Doctor - Performs a full diagnostic on a domain name to identify any DNS issues.

Is BT WiFi hot spot access for their broadband customers really unlimited?

Apparently not. BT restricts access to their Openzone and Fon WiFi network to 10,000 minutes per month (approximately 7 days) with warnings sent out when you reach 8,000. This is in spite of it being advertised as "unlimited". 

Given that they supply an Android app which logs you in automatically it will not take long to get to 10,000 minutes, especially as the app makes it difficult to stop from connecting even when you are at home where you should be using your own wifi.

Its not just Scientology and Wikipedia

In case you haven't heard, Wikipedia has banned IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology from making edits to articles. But it's not just Scientology that's at it. Other religious groups are equally as concerned about the free exchange of opinions about their activities. Free discussion does not fit well with most religions and truth seems to be an issue of opinion rather than fact. Hence the founding of Conservapedia by American right wing Christians which gives a version of the truth which is less offensive to them.

"I've tried editing Wikipedia, and found that the biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views," Andy Schlafly, the founder of Conservapedia, told the Guardian. "In one case my factual edits were removed within 60 seconds - so editing Wikipedia is no longer a viable approach." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/mar/02/wikipedia.news)

Religious groups don't like the Internet. I had my own encounter with a local religious group on Wikipedia last year. It is not likely to end any time soon.

Setting up a custom URL shortener with Bitly

I recently set up a custom URL shortener using Bitly. The custom domain service used to be charged for, but is now free. The domain name I used was gh.cm which I paid for using some remaining balance at one of the domain registrars I use. It cost $99 for a year. I want to use it for URL shortening and as part of an image hosting service (for my own personal use and as a bit of a technical challenge). If you go to http://gh.cm you will see that it takes you to the bit.ly front page. This is unfortuante, but just the way it works. To counteract this a bit I have set www.gh.cm to go to my business profile web site.

It integrates with Tweetdeck and Twidroyd using the Bitly API key. Any links I make from the Bitly web site, via Tweetdeck or from the Google Chrome extension use gh.cm by default.

However, there are a few drawbacks to all of this that I have not found a solution to:

1. If I use the Twitter web interface it sometimes shortens my already shortened links.

2. There appears to be no way of letting anyone else use my custom shortener without giving them my bitly API key (although making a link with bitly and then replacing bit.ly with gh.cm works).

3. There is no way to use Bitly with the Twitter web site interface (although you can use Cotweet as an alternative).

I might consider setting up my own shortening script on my own server, but this would lead to further integration difficulties.

The set up itself was very simple. Once the domain was registered I logged into my Bitly account, went to the link shortening box and where it says "shorten with:" I selected custom domain. This took me to a page woth the instructions. I used this to make the necessary changes to the DNS settings on my domain registrars name servers. Once the new version of the zone file had propagated it all started working.

The advantage of having my own shortener is that it gives the impression that I know what I am doing on the internet (which I obviously do having founded and run a successful - and profitable - web hosting company). Its a reminder to people that I still have those skills and its useful marketing. Its also quite nice that "gh.cm" is reminiscent of my professional profile web site address gordonhudson.com.

Update:
Feedburner does not support the use of Bitly so I have left my email subscription service on Feedburner and moved my automatic tweeting of new posts to dlvr.it. This was a simple case of entering my feedburner  feed address and my Bitly API key. This defaults to my custom domain and it is working correctly.

I have also installed the Bitly browser extension for Chrome so I can tweet links directly from the browser.

We7 removing ad-free days?

I have noticed that my account at We7 is showing that I have 1 ad free day available and that this is 100% of what is possible. Previously they allowed you to earn up to five advert free days by listening with ads for a certain period of time. I had noticed it being reduced to three and now its down to one, so it looks like they are moving to removing ads only if you pay the subscription.

I did try the free trial subscription for my android phone, but found that the player crashed fairly regularly. It was quite nice on other ways as it stored tracks on the SD card so that if they were requested, but had previously been listened to they ran from the card rather than using bandwidth. In the end, though, it was just too annoying so I did not continue it with a subscription.

SNP web site is hosted in England

Following on from my friend Michele's investigation of where Irish political parties host their web sites I did a quick check on www.snp.org and found it is hosted in England. Admittedly by a Scottish company (Iomart), but interesting that they have decided to host it south of the border.

Traceroute (click for bigger version):

This is probably for technical reasons. All ISP traffic to Scottish users goes through London so its faster to be hosted in London. At the same time its not very good for morale, especially when you realise that the SNP Scottish government is in a powerful position to improve connectivity to and from Scotland.