Can't fix your fault, I have a hospital appointment...

A phone line installed in a slightly odd site up in Scotland, never worked, so we get BT engineer out to fix it, as you do.

It is complicated because the site is unmanned, and the actual customer is based in London. They sent their chap up to Scotland to be there for the engineer and arrange access. Massive inconvenience for them, obviously.

BT engineer turns up, does very little and leaves because he has a hospital appointment, so "we'll just have to book another appointment for another day" WTF!!! We are escalating in BT, obviously.

I am at a loss as to what to say. I just hope shit hits fan in BT somewhere over this.

Some days you really do feel like you are just banging your head against a brick wall.

BT charging for fixing a fault

It seems BT are officially charging money for fixing a fault in the BT network.

If there is a fault, and an engineer goes out, fails to find or fix the fault so that another engineer is needed - even if that second engineer does find and fix the fault and confirms it is a fault in the BT network, BT will still charge for the first (arguably incompetent) engineer visit. The charge is a lot of money - more than most ISPs will make on the broadband line in a year, possibly several years.

[update] I should point out that the charge for one such engineer visit is actually more than it would cost us to get a brand new phone line installed with broadband.

This is, of course, in my opinion, totally unreasonable and unfair in every respect. We could not pass on this in our customer contracts (not that we would want to) as it would fall foul of unfair contract terms legislation. Sadly, in a commercial contract with BT, it is tough!

At the end of the day this means we ultimately have to absorb the extra cost and ultimately pass this on to customers in our pricing.

[update] one may argue that if not us doing that, BT would have to absorb the cost and increase overall prices - but in that case BT have a commercial incentive to fix faults first time. Currently they have a commercial incentive to deploy incompetent engineers.

This is not the first case of apparently unethical charging by BT, at least in my opinion.

We currently have an ongoing battle where BT will charge two ISPs for the same service for the same time. An FTTC line has a 12 month term, arguably because BT plc t/a Openreach charge BT plc t/a BT Wholesale a 12 month minimum term. But if migrating an FTTC from one BT Wholesale ISP to another during that 12 months, which is purely a billing exercise by BT Wholesale and does not involve Openreach they will charge the old ISP for the remainder of the 12 month period and charge the new ISP for the same period, as well as restarting the 12 month term. This is clearly just charging money because they can, and not based on charges they have to pay suppliers or costs in any way. This is also clearly anticompetitive in that when it is BT plc t/a BT Retail that is the ISP that is stitched up by paying this arbitrary extra charge to BT plc t/a BT Wholesale, it has no impact on my BT Group plc shares.

Sadly, telcos like BT don't have to be ethical or fair, do they? If you are a BT Group plc shareholder and don't agree, please tell the board.

Keeping secrets

As I am sure you all know we like to be open and honest at A&A.

For no particular reason I was looking at the Crime and Courts Act 2013 schedule 7 part 3 today.

It lists things that one is not meant to disclose. Well, it says "must not" further disclose some stuff.

Is it me, or does it not list an offence for breach of part 3? The offences (part 5) relate to paragraph 2(2) (further disclosure of HMRC information, personal customs information or personal revenue customs information), or (ii)paragraph 3(2) (further disclosure of social security information) only.

So what happens if someone ignores the "must not" in part 3?

Any lawyers reading that can explain that one to me?

New penknife

I got myself a new penknife.

A penknife is always useful, whether opening parcels, or cutting my nails. I use almost everything on it one time or another, and, of course, being geeky it has a USB memory stick on it. This one also has a pen and tweezers!

I got a new one as the old one had a knackered blade. The old one had extra gadgets including a laser pointer and blue-tooth buttons for doing presentations. Sadly the small batteries fell out and the battery cover bit got lost meaning new batteries did not stay put, and so it got used once for a presentation. When it worked it was very cool. I went for the simpler model this time.

I am quite impressed with the way things like USB memory sticks have moved on. The old one had a 16GB stick. It was complicated with some sort of controller one side, a big flash memory the other, as well as some small active and passive components...

The new one is way simpler. One "chip" with contacts on it on one side that are the USB contacts, and that it it. It is thinner (half shell on USB). Even so the chip only takes half the stick. It is also 32GB.

But even that is clearly 3 years old from the date on the chip! It looks like the previous one is 2009 so 2 years difference between these two solutions.

When I think back to the computer we had at school, we were lucky to have 16K of RAM, and that was probably slower than this :-)

There is, of course, still one invaluable tool I carry which Victorinox do not do in their penknives...

What's special about fibre

In light of my recent blog posts it is about time I was a bit less ranty and a tad more educational, so I decided to try and explain why fibre is important when talking about "fibre optic broadband".

Virgin's explanation of copper being bad and fibre being good talks of your broadband slowing down as it gets further from the exchange (using copper). This is not a bad start to explaining it, but I think I can do a little better.

When we are talking about an Internet connection it means computers passing digital signals over the distance between you and somewhere else in the world (e.g. a web server). Whilst you might see web pages, emails, pictures or movies, it all boils down to ones and zeros carrier over some form of communications link.

There are two main physical communications link that are used (we're not really considering radio / WiFi at this point). The two types of link are copper or fibre.

The picture above shows the two -

The copper is metal, shiny orange-ish metal that conducts electricity. As you know, metal can carry electrical signals. In this picture you see coaxial cable, it means there is a thick copper wire in the middle, an insulation around it, and then a wire mesh around that, which the white plastic around that. This is one common means of carrying electrical signals. The other common means twisted pairs which is two wires, insulated and twisted around each other. These are often with other pairs in a protective outer coating, and usually are colour coded to identify which pair is which.

The fibre looks thin and what you can see in the picture if 4 colours strands. In actual fact that is four glass fibres which themselves consist of an inner and outer layer of glass, and then a protective coating and a colour coding so you can tell which is which of the four, on the left you can see that is all within a further protective coating, and the whole lot goes in plastic tubing. This is one typical way of handling fibre.

Obviously both of these come in various styles. You can get extra thick cooper coax cable for going long distances. You can get different grades of fibre, and they can come in different protective coatings. There are fibres under the sea that need armour coating to avoid damage.

So, it comes down to how these different communications systems carry the digital signals.

When we talk of speed, that si a tad deceptive. The speed of signals is different. The fibre is literally the speed of light (in glass). The copper is a little slower. But that is not actually what concerns you - what matters is the data rate. This is how many bits of digital signal can be carrier per second. So we talk of megabits per second (millions of bits a second) and gigabits per second (billions of bits) and so on. That is what most people think of as "speed" when talking of Internet connections.

Fibre uses light, in fact it uses lasers. The light is not usually visible, and can actually be lots of different frequencies (colours) of light all mixed together in a signal fibre. There are some clever ways to get more signals down a fibre, but even the simplest, which is a single laser that flashes on and off for the ones and zeros, is very reliable and very fast. Whilst the light does get dimmer over distance, the light can go a very long way without any sort of repeater or amplifier and the light can flash very fast allowing very high rates for sending data. It is kind of intuitive that light can go a long way - just look up at the stars and think about it.

Copper, on the other hand, uses electrical signals. These work very well over short distances, and are used for most networking - the cat-5 cables you may see use 4 twisted pairs of copper, and work up to 100m. But making copper carry signals any longer is harder work. There are clever tricks (such as ADSL) for getting signals to go for miles - but the data rates are lower for the longer cables. It is not that the signals slow down as such, but that what you can achieve - how much data per second you can send - is lower on longer lines.

For a copper pair, or coax, going 100m can allow quite respectible data rates. A 100m cat5e cable can easily handle a gigabit per second, and do so very reliably. But going further is hard work, and if you went 10km you would be lucky to get one megabit per second on a copper pair using ADSL.

For a fibre you can easily go 10km, and in fact fibre will quite happily do speeds of gigabits per second at distances of 70km. With more modern systems and multiple lasers a fibre cable can carry terabits per second. So, the distance from an exchange to your home, even if that is 10km, would easily be able to do 10 gigabits with relatively simple equipment these days.

Most of the Internet involves fibres. Any link between any two places that is more than around 100m will almost certainly be fibre (there are point to point microwave links and satellite links in some cases). Often, in equipment racks, the links between equipment, going a few metres, will be copper network patch leads, but even these will sometimes be fibre.

So, when we look at the Internet service you get at home, the hundreds of miles of fibre in the Internet are not the important bit - that just works - that is "fast". The important bit is the last part that gets to your home. In your home you can use fast short network leads or whatever you like, but the last few miles or even the last hundred meters to your home is what matters.

There are tricks done by BT, Virgin, and others. These are to get the fibre that bit closer - some times within a few hundred meters - by having fibre to a street cabinet. That means the last bit is much improved even using copper, but it is still massively different to using fibre.

Fibre to the cabinet and coax or twisted from the cabinet for the last bit can get speeds at a few 100 megabits if you are close. If you truly had a fibre from the exchange all the way to your home then that could ultimately handle terabits (not that any ISP could afford to sell such a service yet).

There is another factor with fibre vs copper. Whilst glass may seam fragile, it gets well protected, but copper suffers from some other problems which don't affect fibre. Copper can pick up radio interference from thin air, be subject to nearby lightening strikes, and get corrosion of joints. Fibre, on the other hand, just works, and short of someone putting their JCB through it, it will stay working pretty much forever.

So it matters what is in the last bit - the link to your home - and whether it is fibre or not.

Biggleswade Sweet Chilli Crisps

I like these crisps!

Pipers do some rather nice and quiet strongly flavoured crisps.

But why "Biggleswade" sweet chilli? Well, I can only assume that by naming the specific region where the chilli is grown they are giving the impression of having carefully selected the very best chilli to use and are proud of it. Indeed, that may actually be the case, but from a marketing point of view it is all down to perception. They could have said almost any town where chilli is grown and created the same impression.

But really, could I tell if it was some other sweet chilli that was used? No, of course not. I either like the flavour or I don't and I am not an expert and could not tell where the chilli was grown. There may be someone that can tell but I am sure almost everyone buying these will not be able to tell. The people that could tell probably would not stoop to eating crisps :-)

Now, recently I was accused of some extreme pedantry over the whole "fibre optic broadband" thing. My understanding is that they get away with it (both Virgin and BT) because the service they sell is the same whether actually fibre all the way or not. I.e. the customer cannot tell the difference. Obviously there will be those that can tell (without looking at the cable itself) as I believe DOCSIS has different characteristics in terms of latency jitter than a proper fibre service. But for almost all practical purposes they are the same.

Apparently, except for extreme pedants, that is all that matters, and so the ASA are happy for the service to sold as "fibre optic broadband".

So, does that mean that I cannot trust my crisps? Could they be using any old sweet chilli on the basis that I cannot tell the difference and therefore it does not matter. Or is it actually fair and reasonable, and not just extreme pedantry, for me to expect that I get what it says on the packet even though I can't tell the difference?

So...

1. Is it acceptable for Biggleswade Sweet Chilli crisps not to actually have Biggleswade sweet chilli?
2. Is it acceptable for fibre optic broadband not to actually be fibre optic?
3. If not the same answer to both, what is the dividing factor here - why is one OK and one not?

Just curious...

Zebra++

I had a visit from Zebra, which was a couple of guys, one from their Borne End office and one from the US that does development.

They were very interested in what we were doing, and the whole thing about using the printers from linux boxes that were not local. They do not have a linux API/library yet, only Windows, so their current model is around applications on a windows machine working the printer locally.

We do things differently and have what would these days be called cloud services that talk to the printer from machines running linux and web servers based on remote sites and data centres. Our staff access them via web pages and it manages work flow for everything from printing router programming cards to issuing and printing SIMs.

They were impressed with what I had worked out by packet dumping their protocol and how we used it, and were interested in ways it could be used to go to market with printers - e.g. cloud based student management for a colleges with an on-site card printer. The fact we can do the broadband side and IPs and firewall and port mapping was even more interesting. The fact that the printer does IPv6 is a bonus as well for this - well done.

I was pretty impressed that they wanted to see ways of using their printers and software that they had not expected, and took us seriously.

I was even more impressed that they sent me their internal documentation on the Ethernet interface and are working on ways to USB hub the card reader in to the product to allow working via a single Ethernet interface. I have sent them my command line tools and we'll keep in touch. My code is likely to be updated based on their spec, but it seems I was spot on for most of my reverse engineering.

So well done Zebra for being a forward looking manufacturer. We need more like this. I have had to reverse engineer so many things this is refreshing.