Reliance

I have been frustrated this week by a fault on my phone line causing an absence of the telephone. This is not a problem for me because I can use my cellphone but it does mean that anyone trying to contact me cannot do so if they don't have my cellphone number. It also means, of course, that my internet connection is affected. Most of the time for the last 4 or 5 days I've had little or no internet. So I haven't been reading many blogs.

It has made me realise that I am very reliant indeed on my internet connection. I use it for my laptop and phone and iPad which is fairly obvious. Without those I can't communicate with my son (in Italy) or my friends in New Zealand or anywhere else for that matter. However my radio, television and music also rely in one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent on the internet as does my printer and Alexa and Siri (whom I use for reminders and timers amongst other things).

There is no 3G or 4G here either so I can't use my phone for the internet.

BT have been brilliant and have kept me informed and could actually have had an engineer here on Friday (and the fault mended yesterday) but I was out all day on Friday so he came yesterday (Saturday) afternoon. He identified exactly where the problem is (293 metres from my house) but didn't carry the necessary equipment to enable him to dig up the cable. Today is Sunday and tomorrow is Bank Holiday but they are hoping it will be mended tomorrow.

I'll be away on the early morning ferry though.

It's been an interesting week and I'll post about it soon.

Broadband Dreams

Before I came away it was a hectic few days with the BT Openreach engineer trying to sort out my broadband connection. The engineer was a great guy called Robbie from Liverpool who had a companion called Mick on the first day - for health and safety reasons given the gales on Monday - so there was plenty of good scouse banter whilst they beavered away. It’s well over forty years since I’ve been in company like that. They were up on temporary secondment with their vans because of the overwhelming telecommunications problems on the Island due to the lightning in December and the subsequent storms. By lunchtime of Tuesday I had a stable signal around the 1 Mbps.  If it stays stable when I get back I might now be able to watch YouTube and even iPlayer. It was fortunate that when he arrived my broadband connection was dropping every 5 minutes and the engineer could witness it for himself. I’m just hoping that when I get home it’s still as good.

So it was with interest that I noticed an article Tuesday's The Times entitled ‘Broadband speeds are getting lower as UK falls behind’. Apparently the average UK broadband speed is 10.7 Mbps which means that we’re 19th in the world and have fallen behind South Korea (average 25.3 Mbps). However we are, apparently, better off than France, Spain and Italy. What, of course, that doesn’t tell us is how widely available broadband is. In New Zealand unless you are located very close to a school many rural communities do not have broadband. Located as I was a stone’s throw from Napier I only had broadband because a local geek and entrepreneur decided to put micro-wave broadband in the area. NZ Telecom just said it wasn’t profitable. I cannot imagine that it’s profitable in the Western Isles but, as with cellphone coverage, the Government has invested millions in infrastructure.

For me and my neighbours however 10.7 Mbps is something we can only dream about. Just having a steady signal is our goal. When I arrived at Anna's it struck me just how fast webpages loaded.: 13Mbps. Sigh. 

No Complaints = No Problems (Q. E D.)

I am a fan of BT (British Telecom for those of you who might not know) who provide telephone and broadband services here in the UK.  I have been a customer for the best part of half a century.  Living in the wilds of the Scottish Outer Hebrides I am very much aware of the problems of providing services to remote communities and am always grateful for the fact that we have, generally speaking, good and relatively inexpensive communications (thanks in no small part to large Government  and EC subsidies).  

Many of my neighbours have little or no time for BT.  So it comes as an even bigger disappointment to me when they let me down.  For a long time now broadband on the Island has been very poor both in terms of speed and reliability and there have been petitions and news campaigns: all to no or little avail.  Basically there is not enough capacity to meet demand and it will be a few years before the exchanges are brought up to date and new fibre-optic cables laid.  I can live with poor broadband but not without it!  Recently BT asked me to run some tests because their equipment was showing that I had a connection.  I did and I do (at this moment).  Unfortunately I couldn't run the tests on my Macbook Pro (which can connect to the router by ethernet) because the Flash Player needed updating and there was not enough capacity in the broadband signal to do so.  Catch 22.  

An engineer was due to visit last Thursday afternoon because there is a problem with the phone line too so that may be affecting the broadband.  He didn't and there was no apology or explanation.  Another call to India.  Another visit arranged for Monday morning.  Hopefully he will find a fault and rectify it.  If he doesn't he'll be able to tell them that. The more complaints the more likely it is that action will be speeded up. Unfortunately 'the system' is such that if complaints are not made then there is no problem.

Communicating

I've just posted several letters, two post cards and a three notecards to friends and family in New Zealand and several other countries including England.

It made me think, once again, about the way we communicate now and the comparison with when I was born 70 years ago.  Then the only generally used methods of communication were face to face, the postal service a telegram or a telephone call.

In England the Royal Mail was established in 1516 effectively providing a publicly available second form of communication after word of mouth.

Telegrams provided by the railway companies provided a third means of communication and were taken over by the Post Office in 1870 but were finally abandoned in 1982. However  I've just discovered that http://www.britishtelegram.com will deliver an urgent telegram within two hours for a fee of about £60.

My parents had a telephone which provided the fourth means of communication before I was born but it wasn't the norm in those days.  Liverpool had, however, played quite an important part in the development of the telephone service in the UK when, in 1911, ATM based about 2 miles from where I was born became the first manufacturer of automatic telephone equipment in the UK.  In 1912 there were just over half a million phones in the UK and it was bought by the Post Office.  In my childhood it was still necessary to book calls abroad and until fairly recently phoning abroad was expensive.

Mobile or Cell Phones became available in the mid 1980s but it wasn't until the early 1990s with GSM in 1991 and then 2G that they came into general use in Britain.  I've had mine with the same number (with add-ons to the front as more numbers became necessary) since 1991.

More changes came in the mid 1990s when the Internet became generally available and with it came the World Wide Web. 

Since then the changes have been phenomenal.  I have been thinking over he last few days of the different ways I communicate daily with people all over the world and what form that communication takes.

Obviously this list is not exhaustive but these are the means of communication I use:

Via the postal service: letters, post cards, note cards and greetings cards

Via the 'landline' telephone service: telephone calls and text messages

Via the cellphone network: telephone calls and text messages

Via the Internet (which may be via the landline or cellphone networks): Skype (phone calls, video calls and text chats); Telegram App (instant messages and chats which may incorporate files, pictures and other data as one 'chats'); Facebook's Messanger App and Facebook's chat and WhatsApp (which are similar to the Telegram app);  post cards taken on my cellphone using ByPost or NZ Post's Send a Card; Instagram to share photos and doubtless other's I haven't remembered.

Finally (although it uses the Internet and WWW) there is blogging.

The world is truly a very small place indeed and most of the smallness came in the last twenty years.

With all that, though, what truly matters is not that we are able to communicate but what we say when we do.

The Simple Life - Not

Why have we suddenly started using this curious form of emphasising a statement?  Quoi? Je vous entends demander.  The making of a positive statement and then following it with 'not'.  Why the French?  Wondering if someone got the idea from the French use of 'pas' as a negation after the statement.  Just a thought.

OK.  Back to the theme.  The simple life - lost and gone for ever.  Just like Clementine.

I think that I was born with a 'need to be in communication' gene inherited from my Mum.  The first requirement in the house when Mum and Dad got married was a telephone.  I cannot envisage life without the telephone and have had a mobile/cellphone for over 20 years since the days when they were larger than bricks.  I still have some of them and have been meaning to blog on that for several years.

However during that 20 years the whole subject of interpersonal communication has changed far beyond the impact of the cellphone.

The World Wide Web effectively came into being in 1990 and in about 1992 the first web browsers started making progress towards universal inter-personal communication.  This was around the same time as the 2G cellular technology was introduced.

And with the advent of these two things the way most of us live our lives changed for ever.

I think that we have come to accept the WWW and the Internet, cellphones and now smartphones to such an extent that we fail to realise that instant communication for the 'ordinary' person is only a couple of decades old.

Before that even phone calls made over the terrestrial phone lines were expensive and often had to be booked in advance.  Remember Star Trek?  It started in 1966 and even many years later the 'communicator' was regarded as science fiction.  The flip top cellphone with international call availability has come and gone to be replaced by a computer we hold in our hand with over a million times more computing power than the first spacecraft.

So now we have SMS via our cellphones, chat by text or voice via the cellphone network or via SKYPE and suchlike, Facebook with public and private communication and Twitter.  We have emails too.  All of these offer instant communication almost worldwide.  As an aside I can recall even in 1998/9 when I was in the Australian outback, being able to ring my parents each night on my cellphone.

Of course we still have the public 'ordinary' telephone network and, of course, we can still put pen to paper and post a letter.  Gone are the months a letter could take to New Zealand.  Five days is about the norm now.

Blogland.  I haven't mentioned Blogland.  And it is Frances's post a few days ago Why do we blog? which started me on this course of thought.

So this evening (written Monday evening) as I am writing this blog post my next door neighbour keeps popping in (brought me some fresh mackerel he had caught today and just smoked).  I've had a phone call (you know, the sort where the house phone rings and you chat to someone).  My cellphone is going ten to the dozen with texts back and forth with a dear friend who is looking after her granddaughters whilst her daughter and grandson are sunning themselves with The Handbag in Napier on holiday.  I'm discussing, by email, bridge cameras with a friend in Fife whom I've known for 40 years.  I'm looking up the news on the volcanic eruption in New Zealand.  I'm playing four simultaneous games of Words with Friends.  I have various emails to write before sleep and I have a phone call to make to a friend from teenage years in Canada to discuss our holiday in Italy in a few weeks time.

In short I have in front of me the tools to communicate with almost anyone almost anywhere.

Someone made a comment on a Blogland friend's post recently that "today's tech like phones, you ignore real life people beside you so communication ironically breaks down".   I suppose that can happen and it's certainly a point of view I've heard expressed before.  However I would offer the contrary view that we now have an entirely different form of communication in that many of us communicate much more: it's just that we have added many different forms of communication to that of face to face talking.

One tiny example.  When I was a teenager a friend's father was the Chief Engineer on a deep sea ship which often spent 9 months away from Britain at a time. Whilst he was away his wife would get letters (often few and far between if I remember correctly) and that was it.  He arrived home a virtual stranger in his own house.  Now my son, Gaz, is a Chief Engineer and I can talk to him, email him, text him, Skype him and we need never lose touch at all.  I know which scenario I prefer. 

One spin-off that all this produces is an awareness of the time differences between us all.   Living in New Zealand half the year does make me very aware in any case but so that I don't get confused I have the following on my computer desktop.

This has been a bit of a disjointed ramble but I think it does serve the purpose of the heading: The Simple Life - Not!

Telephonic Communication

When I returned home the quality of the telephone line was poor.  No, that's being too charitable, it was terrible.  So on Friday afternoon I rang British Telecom who provide my service and spoke to a lovely lady, Rebecca, by name.  As soon as I spoke to her she said "Well, I don't have to ask what fault you are phoning to report.".  She said that she would run a test and phone me on my cellphone.  A few minutes later she duly reported that there were several faults on the line and that it would be fixed by 5pm on 11 May.  "It'll probably be well before that, though.".   Sure enough on Saturday morning as we were having breakfast the engineer rang to check I was in as he was about to set off to investigate.  By midday I had a new line in the house and a junction between the exchange and my house which had water ingress had been replaced.  I had a good phone again.  My Broadband speed had also improved from appalling to just plain bad (I'm too far from the exchange to expect much better than that).  So many people complain about their telephone provider that I thought that I would just post a big 'Thank you' to BT!