Broadband... its the future. Not.

So the transition to SKY went seemlessly and I can't fault the gear they sent, or the install instructions. It worked perfectly (1Mb is better than I had by a whole 100%) for the first five days, then died on its arse. Its now been out for past 36 hours so far. I've got it escalated to their Tier 3 Technical Team, but the turnaround for a response is five working days. Groan. All of our neighbours have been doing the same thing - when one is out, we're all out. Jules has been on to her employers technical support and they've just requested a BT Wholesale engineers visit - in the next week we hope. The broadband coming into our street has been rock solid (albeit slow) for the past two years but things went wrong on Sunday 7th Jan. Connections dropped for hours, then days at a time. One of the neighbours was told by the engineer that came to her that he suspected a neighbour with a faulty router further up the street which (when switched on) is causing feedback back in the local telephone network. Sounds a bit implausable to me, but it would go someway to explaining the inconsistency of the fault. What strikes me most is the sheer difficulty in making progress with any fault like this which affects a whole neighbourhood. Calls to BT are as pointless as screaming at the cat. BT Wholesale will not (normally) take incoming calls from the great unwashed, so you are forced to plough your way through your ISP's call centre in Manchester, Wigan, Dublin, Bangalore etc repeating your query over and over again. All of us doing this. The WHOLE street racking up premium call after premium call so that hopefully someone in BT Wholesale will get their backside kicked. *** Quick update - been offline now for 2.5 days. Utter sh*te. ***

Run... its the Polis!

"Externally, it must have looked fantastic one hundred years ago but not unlike every lane in Terry Pratchetts novels, its not the kind of place you want to wander about late at night."

Only a month ago I mentioned that Renfield Lane was its own little crime hotspot and sure enough at the moment there's Police at either end of the (cordoned off) lane and a few cars dotted about. The concierge at our old office up the hill reliably informs me that a body has been found, and two fancily-embroidered-cap-wearing High Heid Yins (as my dear old Nanna would have called them) have just went into the office next to ours. Expect more news as soon as someone from the Evening Times starts rooting through the bins. Are we the crime capital of Europe or does it just feel like that sometimes?