The exciting news is that yesterday I signed up for broadband (ADSL). I should
have it in ten days or so.
Years ago, I used to visit Sean Patrick's site. He was one of the first gay
webcam guys and, even back in 1998, he had a high-speed connection in Washington
DC. When I started my website, in December 1999, I never imagined it would be
more than three years before I'd have the same facility here in Manchester --
the second most important city for business in England.
In fact it was all I could do to get online on dial-up! British Telecom repeatedly
disconnected my line by mistake (seven times in 18 months). Sometimes I was offline
for two days at a time and the problem was only resolved when I complained directly
to the Chief Executive of BT.
Over the years, British Telecom seems to have done everything in its power
to prevent us from having, first, flat-rate charging for dial-up (which it claimed
wasn't viable), and then broadband. Even now there's little prospect of rural
communities getting a high-speed service through BT.
Although I live in Manchester city centre, I'm in a poor part of town. BT announced
that our local exchange would only be enabled for broadband if more than 350 people
expressed an interest in having the service. An awful lot in what is one of the
most disadvantaged communities in the UK. Not that BT was in the slightest bit
concerned about that of course.
However, there were a couple of us in the block where I live who were running
Internet-related businesses and we decided to do everything we could to try and
get this service for the area.
Of course my voice was just one amongst many and discontent was building about
this issue right across the country. At the end of January, BT reduced the threshold
on our local exchange from 350 to 250 and, to our delight, we already had more
than the required number of people. So the exchange was finally enabled for broadband
on 16 April.
Interestingly, there are still many exchanges where the trigger level is 350
or 400 registrations. It would cost £1.6 billion to enable every one of
the 6,700 UK telephone exchanges regardless of current demand. Too much says BT.
Yet, O2, the mobile arm which BT 'demerged' in November 2001, recently announced
an incredible pre-tax loss of £10.2 billion!
British Telecom could have been a great force in making broadband available
to everyone in this country but, instead, chose not to be. I really dislike the
way BT has held back my business over the past five years. For a couple of years
I had huge bills with them, as pay-by-the-minute Internet access was all that
was available and there have been web projects that I simply couldn't do on 56k
dial-up.
For the last five years, I've done everything I can to give alternative suppliers
my business. Needless to say I have not signed up for broadband with BT (which
has a terrible reputation as an ISP anyway).
And there is worse ahead for BT... Soon, for the first time, other companies
will be able to offer a complete telephone service including the 'local loop'.
This means customers will no longer be forced to have any dealings with British
Telecom (currently most people get a bill from them for line rental).
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