Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Reliance on the digital world

Despite the hideously annoying Kevin Bacon TV ads, we are with EE. Twice this year our broadband/landline went down, at least a week each time to sort it. First time, the "engineer" suggested we had woodlice in the junction box at our house -- was he winding us up ??? Second time, the fault was traced to a major subterranean fault in the town. Openreach sent a sub-contracted engineer who found some disconnected wires somewhere in the spaghetti. £9.27 a day compensation slightly helped improve my mood, but generally I'm not impressed.

I have to say that up until now I have been happy with Virginmedia and the current issue is with the emails. The broadband has been OK. We have had a few outages over the years but never too long even when a contractor severed the power line to the street junction box. Two VM vans sat by the box providing power until the cable was repaired.

I was in a supermarket a while ago when they had a power blackout.

All the tills were out and a supervisor was running up and down shouting "get out the emergency packs".

Now you might be wondering what these 'emergency' packs were!!!!


They were a big brown envelope containing a battery powered calculator, a pencil & note pad.


WOW!

But how would they take payment?

For those of you with Virgin, good luck, the merger with O2 is not based on becoming a world leader but to try and gain more services to cross sell. TEF have been trying to offload the UK O2 business forever and investment was culled in many areas during that period. I doubt the new business is going to be as well funded as it needs to be to fight the other two monsters that are shaping up.

BT, EE, PlusNet
Vodafone, Three (with the merger announcement last week)

Re the comment on DNS there are lots of alternative services available now.
There is no reason that you have to use the one provided by your ISP.

https://www.techradar.com/news/best-dns-server
I have been using Cloudflare for some time now and it's great.

Cloudflare offer an excellent free consumer service which is also a lot more private, set to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
They also offer a curated pron/gambling filtered DNS for those who would benefit 1.1.1.3 etc

Google offer a free service however you are feeding the beast with your info to mine 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

For those of you into the plumbing around the Internet Cisco bought a company called OpenDNS some time back. They have a filtering engine built into theirs which is intended to try and get rid of the nasty stuff (phishing and dodgy web sites) it is included with most Cisco and Meraki engineering. I use it for deployments to provide another layer of benefit. I did not realise that you could use them for home stuff. 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

If you want to look at your home router there will normally be a setting for the WAN/IP port. This is to allow the home box to look upstream out of your building. Leave the IP, mask and GW addresses the same. If you can see a "DNS" entry (take note of the old one before you make any changes) and try using the others and see if it is quicker or better.

One thing I have noted for performance and response is that the little home wifi-router boxes they give you "free" are becoming to slow for the bandwidth being put on the back of them. When home broadband was 2-8Mb or even 36Mb you could use a fairly cheap home box. With 72Mb, 100Mb and more becoming available these boxes have not always been upgraded to match this. I went with Shell Broadband some time back and the box they sent me was miserable even on 36Mb. I bought my own unit (high end Asus or Draytek) and the change was amazing.

My almost total lack of knowledge and interest in all thing IT meant that that I understood almost nothing that Alistair put in his last post.....😁

It's not that I'm so old that it has passed me by (late 50's), I just never been remotely interested in it. I can do enough to get by, just, but as absolutely everything is now on a computer or smart phone I find I'm becoming more and more annoyed/frustrated by the modern world.
I did make the leap to apple pay during the first lockdown and seeing as it's almost impossible to use cash anymore I can get by.
As has been said, I fully expect 'it' to all go very badly wrong before too much longer, we, the general public are pretty vulnerable and useless nowadays as we're so reliant on the 'modern world'.

We've had virgin and NTLworld as long as we've had the internet, Our NTL email address just disappeared the other year never to be seen again, nothing we or they could do could get it back. Very frustrating..........

Off grid is the way forward...........

BT Internet, maybe surprising to some, have provided us with a reliable and rapid service over 6 or 7 years in both Cheshire and Norfolk.

If it’s not broke - don’t fix it.

Incidentally, who is Kevin Bacon?

Interesting hearing all you chaps down south complaining about the internet. I live out in the sticks in North Yorkshire and had to ditch our land line as BT wouldn't supply the Broadband as it was so slow. Alistair, I had to laugh at your comment
"When home broadband was 2-8Mb", if only! At the moment on Mobile Broadband and on a good day I get 1.5 mbps, takes minutes sometimes to open a email. Neilda, I wouldn't venture up this way if I were you, our nearest petrol station only takes cash and he is not alone. The majority of car parks still demand cash so living by your phone alone you would't last long. If only the rest of the country would follow suit, life would become a pleasure again. Hate this unreliable HiTech world.

Sir P

And how did they know what the prices were? It's all barcodes now with the prices on a central database.

Thanks for that - printed off. Maybe I can get back to a fully working wireless bridge again - though the CAT5 cable is now off the floor and suspended across cupboards etc