Author Topic: Cashless Australia  (Read 26380 times)

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Offline bd139

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #175 on: March 19, 2021, 09:04:32 pm »
I knew what you meant. But since you were joking, what does it matter? I thought it was rather obvious I was misinterpreting you on purpose. Only fair, right?

However, if you were serious, are you serious? Specifically which horrible monopolies are you referring to? Wait, if it's plural, how can it be a monopoly?
But yes, I will agree that infrastructure is lacking in our extremely rural areas(assuming you use distance as a measure of extreme, the US has lots more of that than Europe does...as for the Far East, I suspect you are ignoring the genuine rural areas in your assessment). But that's not a monopoly issue, that's an incentive to build vs revenue issue.

That said, it'll get better over time. At my sisters house in the boondocks of Missouri (150 miles to nearest metro area), she barely gets cell service. At their other property 15 miles away, they got fiber on the road and to their log cabin last year. Plus Elons starlink service may change everything....sister is on the waiting list for that now.

100% serious. Until recently I was working in a fairly senior operations position for a very large US financial org which has problems with a hell of a lot of mobile staff out in the US. We had to rebuild our product to support occasionally connected scenarios. The mobile carriers absolutely are dog shit everywhere unless you're on a major route and the land providers are terrible. And both are from a network perspective either expensive, borked or broken. The worst bit is how inconsistent it can be from town to town and state to state. We had one poor office having to sue AT&T for an infrastructure build out which they failed to deliver for 2 years and kept escalating costs. This was running a few miles to fibre to replace an ageing T1 with an AS400 parked on the end. On a positive note this put is in an amazing situation to market out to countries which are basically deserts with some clumps of houses here and there...

The key problems with US infrastructure is quality, maintenance, local monopolies (look at the lobbying against community fibre) and corruption. That's same as rural Zimbabwe.

Starlink, let's wait and see. It doesn't add up financially yet.

 

Offline bd139

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #176 on: March 19, 2021, 09:13:08 pm »
We have horrible monopolies running our infrastructure. I detest virgin media but I use their service as out of the choice of 2 infrastructure monopolies that we have each running different systems they are the ones that currently have 2 continuous tracts of copper running from my house to their "stuff". My other choice of monopoly is the open reach phone system which is broken and they won't fix it. Despite our semblance of a competitive market in the phone system this is an illusion, I have had about 4 "phone companies" over the last 10 years and non were interested in fixing the damaged line because they just sell one of the two monopolies services, they have no hand or interest in the actual infrastructure.

You picked the wrong one if you went with Virgin. They are a shit show.

The other monopoly is OpenReach which is last mile and quite frankly if you pick a non ass end tier ISP and business contract they are quite good. I'm on Zen Business which is £38.99 a month for a 76Mbit connection and we had a complete cable cut a while ago thanks to some fucktards with a hedge cutter. Picture below. Called Zen at 10:45 when it happened and OR had fixed it by 12:30 the next morning. That is actually fairly normal. Same when we had a fibre seeking hammer drill take out the office fibre - fixed in 6 hours.

If you buy your ADSL from Sky then that was a failure but don't blame OR for crappy service from your ISP. OR are shit hot if you pay who's paying them.



From the point of view of the actual infrastructure there are only 2. I'm not sure how the mobile system works but ultimately there are not many independent operators of that anymore and no two will build base stations in the same area to cut costs as they then have roaming agreements with each other so there is no redundancy there, if my local mast goes down my phone will loose it's signal, in fact when 2 of the operators merged a "redundant" mast was removed and the quality of phone signal reduced. As it is I have internet off the back of the fact that there is redundancy in there being 2 infrastructure systems. Now if i was a supermarket I would really be playing it safe by connecting to both those systems and using more than one card processor, but why would i have 2 internet contracts and pay fees to 2 card processors just in case one of the card processors and/or internet lines goes down? This is why you have outages. The only way you have a rock solid system is to double up the system infrastructure and costs and have redundancy for a once in a few years event in a system that is not safety critical.

Redundancy isn't a great solution. Case in point a friend of mine had two issues with their redundant fibre connection a few years ago which was quite funny:

1. Both diverse fibre peers went down the same duct into the street that was dug up by the gas people.
2. They both terminated in the same rack that the UPS exploded in.

My day job is really architecting around these scenarios at a software level which is where the problem really is. You need to plan for when failure does happen not plan to avoid failures. Failures WILL happen so plan for them. Even the best plans don't work out when something unexpected comes up.

Plan to close the shop for the day or run your business online and go and sit in Starbucks until your shit is fixed. Mine is using the nice new 5G tower down the street  :-+. If that fails I'll jump in the car and hang at my mother's house. Still not going into the bloody office  :-DD
« Last Edit: March 19, 2021, 09:14:50 pm by bd139 »
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #177 on: March 19, 2021, 09:37:43 pm »
You had a cut wire, clear cut case..... :) mine is just poor, worse when it is wet, when i ring the reseller they warn that I will be charged £120 if openreach can't find a problem, we know what that means, they will come out 4 weeks after the rain, find that you can get data down it and claim it's fine.

Yes virgin is a shit show, I hate them, and after 8 years I gave up and went back to them because as I said they are now the ones that hold the monopoly to supplying my house as they are the only ones to actually have a connection to it. They are a nightmare to deal with but they say i will get up to 100Mb/s and i get exactly that all the time without fail unlike the overburdened and outdated phone line.

Had a video call with a friend in Chile, over 4000 miles away, it was like they were just down the road, no lags, perfect natural response time. i have a video call with my dad 4 miles away and it's like he is on the moon with 1-2s lag, we have to use the phone for audio and the lag in the video is significant. Welcome to the British telephone network monopoly where broken lies are only fixed when they are literally cut off.

You can't run a reliable cashless society on our outdate and crumbling infrastructure.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2021, 09:39:15 pm by Simon »
 
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Offline coppice

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #178 on: March 19, 2021, 09:43:46 pm »
Redundancy isn't a great solution. Case in point a friend of mine had two issues with their redundant fibre connection a few years ago which was quite funny:

1. Both diverse fibre peers went down the same duct into the street that was dug up by the gas people.
2. They both terminated in the same rack that the UPS exploded in.
Redundancy is a great solution, but you need to really figure out if you actually have redundancy, and keep questioning your providers. Are you paying for fibres to leave you along two completely different paths, to different switching centres? If not, then they'll probably follow the same path, even if offered by different telecoms suppliers, and one day backhoe, backhoe, its off to work they'll go.
 
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Offline Monkeh

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #179 on: March 19, 2021, 09:44:56 pm »
we had a complete cable cut a while ago thanks to some fucktards with a hedge cutter. Picture below. Called Zen at 10:45 when it happened and OR had fixed it by 12:30 the next morning.

That's nice. I had a complete failure of an underground joint which was expected because they know their joints are shit, I knew exactly where the joint was, it took days for them to send someone to mark out the pavement three metres away, more days to dig and find it wasn't actually there, more days to send someone else who knew what they were doing... and in the end when the second hole was dug, the groundworks guy rejointed the cable while he was there and did a better job than the final joint by Openreach. If you're wondering where he picked up that capability, he used to do cable jointing for them and left to dig holes because he earns more money with a concrete saw and a shovel.

Oh, and I've been promised fibre to my house for a full year now. Still waiting. At this point the local company which got funding a few months ago is going to beat them to it.
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #180 on: March 19, 2021, 09:57:04 pm »
Who was the ISP? A lot of the outcome depends on your service contract.

As for fibre we had the same problem and it wasn’t openreach. Local NIMBY had to snuff it before they could get planning permission for the box. I actually attended the planning meeting and I was fighting people twice my age who didn’t know what the internet even was.
 

Offline Monkeh

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #181 on: March 19, 2021, 09:58:36 pm »
Who was the ISP? A lot of the outcome depends on your service contract.

Zen. Not their fault - Openreach just stink.

As for fibre we had the same problem and it wasn’t openreach. Local NIMBY had to snuff it before they could get planning permission for the box. I actually attended the planning meeting and I was fighting people twice my age who didn’t know what the internet even was.

There's no box - there's ductwork between me and the exchange.
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #182 on: March 19, 2021, 10:00:25 pm »
Business or residential? I’m on their business. Don’t expect them to piss on you if you’re on fire unless you have a business contract.
 

Offline Monkeh

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #183 on: March 19, 2021, 10:05:15 pm »
Business or residential? I’m on their business. Don’t expect them to piss on you if you’re on fire unless you have a business contract.

Irrelevant to the incompetence of Openreach staff. But no, it's not business because, again, that won't fix their dumpster fire infrastructure or bargain basement staff. Some of whom are, not remotely by my choice, family members.
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Cashless Australia
« Reply #184 on: March 19, 2021, 10:08:45 pm »
They send different people out I think. I had a vast improvement in competence since I got a business contract.

But yes they do employ some complete idiots. I had one literally run away and get into his van and drive off after he bust my limping ADSL in 2013. I got an apologetic engineer phone me shortly afterwards to explain. I will give them their due though because it turned out they’d run out of pairs in the street and I had a bad one. For this they actually had to stick a new 400m trunk cable in which took a week to sort out.
 


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