5 ms·

That always hurts. I live in a particularly nice bit of London and there is virtually no mobile phone service other than voice and can only get 80 meg ADSL. Yet

by dgxyz 9mo ago

That always hurts. I live in a particularly nice bit of London and there is virtually no mobile phone service other than voice and can only get 80 meg ADSL. Yet the mole people get better service. Grr.

MagnumOpus 9mo ago
One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up… (Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)
- dgxyz 9mo ago
  There's plenty of riff raff here. Like me :)
  - hotstickyballs 9mo ago
    That directly goes against the earlier post where you said you lived in a particularly nice part of town
    - ceejayoz 9mo ago
      There are a good number of places in the world where people of varied incomes live relatively close.
      - alexfoo 9mo ago
        London tends to get that because it has never really been planned. It just grew over the course of 1600 years and absorbed other areas as it went. There are plenty of areas where a row of £20m+ homes are opposite blocks of 3-bed flats that go for a hundredth of that price. Hundreds of years ago, before the rail or underground network, you still needed plenty of working class to live near where the rich people lived as the rich people still needed shops, servants, etc. Having the city split into individual boroughs means that each borough had to provide for the full economic spectrum. The really expensive boroughs still have plenty of social housing and arbitrary divisions of land mean that things but up against each other from different boroughs. However, new developments don't always get it right, when big green-field or brown-field sites are converted to residential they often struggle to get the correct right, and you end up with bigger areas that only cater for a subset. National planning laws are also circumvented or gamed. If a new site requires a certain percent of "affordable housing" the developers will often agree (with the local borouhgh/council) to roll that over with another couple of projects and then build most of the "affordable housing" all in one place, and the diversity of individual areas is diminished. As you say, there are plenty of other places in the world where this is the case, most of them in countries/cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years.
        traceroute66 9mo ago
        > London tends to get that because it has never really been planned. Not particularly true. Go to a city in the world that REALLY has "never been planned", then come back and tell me London hasn't. ;)
        arcanemachiner 9mo ago
        If you're gonna do the No True Scotsman thing, the least you could do is give an example of a "REALLY" unplanned city.
        mikaraento 9mo ago
        Favelas
      - drnick1 9mo ago
        I am not sure why you would want that however.
        simonw 9mo ago
        A better society. Imagine living somewhere that people who work service or retail jobs (or nursing or teaching or all manner of underpaid but essential professions) can also afford to live!
        drnick1 9mo ago
        Even people with highly paid jobs living in nice areas commute to work.
        KaiserPro 9mo ago
        Because it means that you don't get areas of extremes. (well not as much.) It also means that local services can't be compartmentalised so that only rich people get decent services. For example, southwark uses the same police force to cover the southbank (cultural centre) the £5m apartment blocks, as well as the shithole council estates (well they aren't shitholes anymore.) TLDR: you don't get no-go areas.
    - zipy124 9mo ago
      London has a very high ratio of extremely nice houses on a road opposite council houses, or former council houses. There can often be a very large mix of housing in one area.
      - HarHarVeryFunny 9mo ago
        FWIW ancient Rome was also like this, and for example in Pompeii you can find extremely fancy houses with frescoed dining rooms right next door to single room hovels. They didn't have subways or mobile phones though.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
        It seems to me to be quite the feature ... well, everywhere except the USA. Certainly all over Europe, one finds this mix. In the USA, you generally only find cheap/low quality/small housing stock adjacent to expensive/high quality/large housing stock where there's some municipal or other border, and the two just can't avoid being where they are.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
  > One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up… I have a couple of the 4G-to-wifi bridges they used for the Free Wifi project during the Olympics kicking around somewhere, including the one they used for the promo photos. A friend of mine fitted them in the run-up to the Olympics, and the promo one had been sprayed in beautiful deep blue metallic paint with the logo stuck on. He got given it to fit on a lamp post in a fairly posh London suburb, but the photographer couldn't come out so it was up there for about a week. When he came to remove it about half a dozen angry locals came up, complaining about the "microwave radiation was making them ill" and the "constant humming from it kept them awake at night", kind of thing, all the stuff they'd been ranting to the local fish-and-chips wrapper about. "Oh, really? It's been affecting your health that badly?" "Yes", they all replied, "we're getting a solicitor to take up our case, we're suing over it!" "Oh," he said, opening the case he'd just taken down to reveal that it was completely empty. "Well, you're going to absolutely hate it when I put one up that's actually got the electronics inside then."
ljm 9mo ago
I have the opposite problem where I can only get HyperOptic. Not even OpenReach stuff. No problem with bandwidth but zero price competition, and 5G broadband isn’t viable either. Going from £70/mo for gigabit to £65/mo for 500mb is insulting.
- dgxyz 9mo ago
  Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well. CGNAT or pay extra on top of already insulting prices.
  - maleldil 9mo ago
    I feel like I'm going crazy. Hyperoptic is fine. I pay 40 quid for gigabit, and it's stable and fast.
    - drnick1 9mo ago
      Unless you want to self-host things, in which case CGNAT is a non-starter.
  - traceroute66 9mo ago
    > Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well Sounds like they haven't changed ! I recall helping out a friend to review a Hyperoptic proposal for their development. Hyperoptic's idea of "optic" was fibre to a switch in the basement and then unshielded CAT5e to the users premises. If that wasn't bad enough, even to the untrained eye, you did not need a measuring tape to see they would have exceeded the CAT length limit by quite some margin for many of the users. And that's before their claims of owning the external fibre when in reality they were just contracting an ethernet service from BT. So yeah, I would not touch Hyperoptic with a bargepole. I suspect the other altnets are no better .... "sell, build, disappear off to the sunset" was the impression I got. Reading some of the reviews on the internet about post-sales support I'm not surprised in the slightest that users often struggle to get support once the salesdroid has long departed their doorstep.
- marliechiller 9mo ago
signal11 9mo ago
Is it practical to pay BT or HyperOptic to run fibre to you? If enough households commit to a contract they’ll sometimes do it for free.
zipy124 9mo ago
I almost moved into a nice warehouse space in farringdon once only to discover it only got 12 meg service somehow. I didn't even know you could get less than 80meg now.
- qingcharles 9mo ago
  I moved into a commercial warehouse/workshop space in the center of Chicago in 2021 and was asked to install wired Internet for the building. The workshop that made up the other half of our building had Comcast. All the buildings across the street had Comcast. Called Comcast. Sent a team out. Told me it would be $69,000 installation then minimum $800/month for gigabit. Complained up the chain. They sent another team out and apologized and told me the first team made a mistake on the price. The install would actually be $71,000. AT&T was the only other wired option. Best they could offer was 1.5Mbps. Ended up with a T-Mobile 5G router that gave us a solid 800Mbps down.

by dgxyz 9mo ago

MagnumOpus 9mo ago

One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up… (Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)

dgxyz 9mo ago
There's plenty of riff raff here. Like me :)
- hotstickyballs 9mo ago
  That directly goes against the earlier post where you said you lived in a particularly nice part of town
  - ceejayoz 9mo ago
    There are a good number of places in the world where people of varied incomes live relatively close.
    - alexfoo 9mo ago
      London tends to get that because it has never really been planned. It just grew over the course of 1600 years and absorbed other areas as it went. There are plenty of areas where a row of £20m+ homes are opposite blocks of 3-bed flats that go for a hundredth of that price. Hundreds of years ago, before the rail or underground network, you still needed plenty of working class to live near where the rich people lived as the rich people still needed shops, servants, etc. Having the city split into individual boroughs means that each borough had to provide for the full economic spectrum. The really expensive boroughs still have plenty of social housing and arbitrary divisions of land mean that things but up against each other from different boroughs. However, new developments don't always get it right, when big green-field or brown-field sites are converted to residential they often struggle to get the correct right, and you end up with bigger areas that only cater for a subset. National planning laws are also circumvented or gamed. If a new site requires a certain percent of "affordable housing" the developers will often agree (with the local borouhgh/council) to roll that over with another couple of projects and then build most of the "affordable housing" all in one place, and the diversity of individual areas is diminished. As you say, there are plenty of other places in the world where this is the case, most of them in countries/cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years.
      - traceroute66 9mo ago
        > London tends to get that because it has never really been planned. Not particularly true. Go to a city in the world that REALLY has "never been planned", then come back and tell me London hasn't. ;)
        arcanemachiner 9mo ago
        If you're gonna do the No True Scotsman thing, the least you could do is give an example of a "REALLY" unplanned city.
        mikaraento 9mo ago
        Favelas
    - drnick1 9mo ago
      I am not sure why you would want that however.
      - simonw 9mo ago
        A better society. Imagine living somewhere that people who work service or retail jobs (or nursing or teaching or all manner of underpaid but essential professions) can also afford to live!
        drnick1 9mo ago
        Even people with highly paid jobs living in nice areas commute to work.
      - KaiserPro 9mo ago
        Because it means that you don't get areas of extremes. (well not as much.) It also means that local services can't be compartmentalised so that only rich people get decent services. For example, southwark uses the same police force to cover the southbank (cultural centre) the £5m apartment blocks, as well as the shithole council estates (well they aren't shitholes anymore.) TLDR: you don't get no-go areas.
  - zipy124 9mo ago
    London has a very high ratio of extremely nice houses on a road opposite council houses, or former council houses. There can often be a very large mix of housing in one area.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 9mo ago
      FWIW ancient Rome was also like this, and for example in Pompeii you can find extremely fancy houses with frescoed dining rooms right next door to single room hovels. They didn't have subways or mobile phones though.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
      It seems to me to be quite the feature ... well, everywhere except the USA. Certainly all over Europe, one finds this mix. In the USA, you generally only find cheap/low quality/small housing stock adjacent to expensive/high quality/large housing stock where there's some municipal or other border, and the two just can't avoid being where they are.
ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
> One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up… I have a couple of the 4G-to-wifi bridges they used for the Free Wifi project during the Olympics kicking around somewhere, including the one they used for the promo photos. A friend of mine fitted them in the run-up to the Olympics, and the promo one had been sprayed in beautiful deep blue metallic paint with the logo stuck on. He got given it to fit on a lamp post in a fairly posh London suburb, but the photographer couldn't come out so it was up there for about a week. When he came to remove it about half a dozen angry locals came up, complaining about the "microwave radiation was making them ill" and the "constant humming from it kept them awake at night", kind of thing, all the stuff they'd been ranting to the local fish-and-chips wrapper about. "Oh, really? It's been affecting your health that badly?" "Yes", they all replied, "we're getting a solicitor to take up our case, we're suing over it!" "Oh," he said, opening the case he'd just taken down to reveal that it was completely empty. "Well, you're going to absolutely hate it when I put one up that's actually got the electronics inside then."

ljm 9mo ago

I have the opposite problem where I can only get HyperOptic. Not even OpenReach stuff. No problem with bandwidth but zero price competition, and 5G broadband isn’t viable either. Going from £70/mo for gigabit to £65/mo for 500mb is insulting.

dgxyz 9mo ago
Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well. CGNAT or pay extra on top of already insulting prices.
- maleldil 9mo ago
  I feel like I'm going crazy. Hyperoptic is fine. I pay 40 quid for gigabit, and it's stable and fast.
  - drnick1 9mo ago
    Unless you want to self-host things, in which case CGNAT is a non-starter.
- traceroute66 9mo ago
  > Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well Sounds like they haven't changed ! I recall helping out a friend to review a Hyperoptic proposal for their development. Hyperoptic's idea of "optic" was fibre to a switch in the basement and then unshielded CAT5e to the users premises. If that wasn't bad enough, even to the untrained eye, you did not need a measuring tape to see they would have exceeded the CAT length limit by quite some margin for many of the users. And that's before their claims of owning the external fibre when in reality they were just contracting an ethernet service from BT. So yeah, I would not touch Hyperoptic with a bargepole. I suspect the other altnets are no better .... "sell, build, disappear off to the sunset" was the impression I got. Reading some of the reviews on the internet about post-sales support I'm not surprised in the slightest that users often struggle to get support once the salesdroid has long departed their doorstep.
marliechiller 9mo ago

signal11 9mo ago

Is it practical to pay BT or HyperOptic to run fibre to you? If enough households commit to a contract they’ll sometimes do it for free.

zipy124 9mo ago

I almost moved into a nice warehouse space in farringdon once only to discover it only got 12 meg service somehow. I didn't even know you could get less than 80meg now.

qingcharles 9mo ago
I moved into a commercial warehouse/workshop space in the center of Chicago in 2021 and was asked to install wired Internet for the building. The workshop that made up the other half of our building had Comcast. All the buildings across the street had Comcast. Called Comcast. Sent a team out. Told me it would be $69,000 installation then minimum $800/month for gigabit. Complained up the chain. They sent another team out and apologized and told me the first team made a mistake on the price. The install would actually be $71,000. AT&T was the only other wired option. Best they could offer was 1.5Mbps. Ended up with a T-Mobile 5G router that gave us a solid 800Mbps down.