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10/14/2002 Entry: "Moving home, cold turkey, and "Broken Broadband Britain""
So, I took the plunge and moved home last week. To this place.
What that does mean is that I don't have any decent connectivity at home right now. Hence the "cold turkey" comment. You get so used to having "always on" Internet access, that you don't really notice it until it's gone. Oh, what's on TV tonight, I'll just check online... oh. Can't. Is my train to work cancelled, I'll just check online... ah. Small problem.
Why don't I have access? Because "Broadband Britain" cannot cope with people moving home. The system is broken.
It turns out that you cannot successfully order broadband against a phone line which doesn't exist yet, even if there is an order inside BT for the line to be activated on the day that you move. The Broadband bit of BT, BT Wholesale, obviously don't talk to BT Retail (the people you buy your POTS service from), and cannot see if there is a job existing for a line to be activated.
So, that means if you try and order from your ISP before the line has dialtone, the order will silently fail, and no-one will notice until you try and hook up your ADSL stuff.
Wires-only (i.e. provide your own ADSL router) installs seem to be treated as connections for home users and "hobbyists" - this obviously doesn't include internet professionals who want to configure their own router and access policies. This means we get treated as "lower priority" for the installs too. Sigh.
Oh, and the best thing about this is that it's all your own fault for ordering the service from the ISP before the POTS line is active. Good, eh?
So, it's not possible to get a seamless broadband install when you move home. For Christ's sake BT folks! We should be living in a world where broadband is ubiquitous. It should be enabled at the same time as they put dialtone on your phoneline. But that would involve a Telephant like BT actually having some internal communication.
Whose fault is it? Well, the prize goes to your friends and mine at BT, for designing such a weak system in the first place. I can't really blame the ISP, their procedures are written around what they have to do to place the orders from BT. I give it about a year before this becomes a real big problem, and is one of the biggest complaints about Broadband.
If anyone from BT is reading, get in touch, and I'll tell you what you need to do to keep the drooling Internet masses happy. My consultancy rates are... ;-)
