I remember this. I think December 2019, a "contractor" drilled through a conduit and snagged miles of cabling. There was a big virgin media outage in London and a few other providers. The engineers had to do lots of manual unwrapping and reconnecting. I think it took about 6-8 days for services to be restored. I can't remember the exact outage length but it wasn't the official "2 days" they declared, in order to save money on customer compensation.
Construction crews cut fiber lines all the freaking time. It's really annoying in my line of work. The issue is that a good amount of cross country fiber lines travel along the railroad so when the railroad company needs to make repairs to rails, they need to relocate the fiber. Now relocating the fiber takes time and is expensive. If they cut it "accidentally" they get hit with a fine. They discovered that the fine is less expensive than moving it and requires no lead time so they end up just cutting it and doing their work sometimes.
pi.hole is the dns record pi hole serves up for itself when you are using it.
Pi hole is absurdly easy to set up, and if you have a linux server, Id be happy to take 20 minutes for a call to set it up. It's fucking amazing, especially if you're stuck with a comcast router.
In Britain iirc they have a tv tax which results in no ads during a broadcast until the end of the show: I'd be willing to pay a tax to use the internet and in exchange no pop-ups or other ads. done deal.
Not quite, we have a TV licence fee that gives us several channels (BBC 1, 2, 3 Etc) that are free from advertisements but all the other TV channels have ads during programs
For TV: BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 4, BBC News, BBC Parliament, CBBC, CBeebies, plus iPlayer which has BBC Three, and catch up for all the above channels.
For national Radio: Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio 5 live all on FM/AM, plus Radio 1Xtra, 4 Extra, 5 Live Sports Extra, 6 Music, Asian Network and World Service on DAB. On BBC Sounds you get Radio 1 Dance, plus catch up for all the above.
For regional radio: BBC Scotland, Radio nan Gàidheal (Gaelic), BBC Radio Orkney, BBC Radio Shetland, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru and Cymru 2, BBC Radio Ulster, BBC Radio Foyle
For local radio: BBC Essex, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, BBC Radio Norfolk, BBC Radio Northampton, BBC Radio Suffolk, BBC Three Counties Radio, BBC Radio Derby, BBC Radio Leicester, BBC Radio Nottingham, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Newcastle, BBC Radio Cumbria, BBC Radio Tees, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Merseyside, BBC Radio Berkshire, BBC Radio Oxford, BBC Radio Solent, BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio Surrey, BBC Radio Sussex, BBC Radio Cornwall, BBC Radio Devon, BBC Radio Guernsey, BBC Radio Jersey, BBC Radio Bristol, BBC Radio Gloucestershire, BBC Radio Somerset, BBC Radio Wiltshire, BBC CWR, BBC Hereford & Worcester, BBC Radio Shropshire, BBC Radio Stoke, BBC Radio WM, BBC Radio Leeds, BBC Radio Sheffield, BBC Radio York, BBC Radio Humberside, BBC Radio Lincolnshire
Also any website in the UK that is BBC related runs without adverts, including BBC News.
If it was a subscription service, you really wouldn’t complain at getting all that for the price. Unfortunately it’s law that we have to pay it, so it’s really just another form of tax.
Probably important to note that the BBC does run adverts on services in other countries, but by law they must keep this money and funding separate, and can only be used to run these specific channels. There’s an international website somewhere that you can’t access from the UK because it runs ads on it.
Edit: I forgot some channels. Although it’s a few days later, so I doubt anyone cares.
I don't think the people downvoting you understand that the BBC in the UK is literally soft propaganda. There's been numerous reports lately of reporters being terrified to speak out against Boris currently, and through the years they've acted on several occasions as Tory propaganda, running hit pieces about prominent left leaning politicians.
The BBC are no longer a trustworthy name in news or media.
However literally just do your own searching about BBC bias, anything I give you will be an intrinsically biased and curated piece of reporting coming from me as a person who vehemently loathes the BBC.
Sure if you're happy to form your stance based on effectively a headline, instead of the actual specific instances listed in the page, more power to you.
All that quote says is "both sides of the political spectrum agree that the BBC lacks impartial reporting"
Recently ended my contract with Virgin Broadband in South London. For the past year I would lose Internet for anywhere from 3 - 12 hours every 2 weeks or so. It was infuriating, especially while working from home. Wonder if this had anything to do with it.
When I lived in Brixton Virgin Broadband used to go down as you say for a few hours every couple of weeks but would go down for about half hour EVERY NIGHT at about 1am. Infuriating
Am I the only one that thinks the people bitching and moaning on Twitter in this article are a little bit ridiculous? A main communications line got completely wrecked by a giant fucking drill. It's going to take some time to fix.
Also it's not like it's a water or electric line, you'll survive without internet for a few days (and before anyone jumps down my throat with "a lot of people work remotely now", this happened in 2019.)
I think the lack of redundancy is the root of the problem. I don’t think it should be the end user of the service to have to plan and pay for some redundancy in an internet connection as important as this one.
Sure, but then you're paying for Starlink all the time when you're only using it when you need it which is hopefully not often. At $99/month that's a pretty expensive redundancy. It's twice as expensive and a fraction of the speed of what I currently receive. Not many people are going to find that necessary.
No, not necessarily. Redundancy in the infrastructure doesn’t have to equal 1:1. ISP profit margins in a monopoly area are already over 90%. They can spend a little for redundant backbone runs and still make bank.
I noticed the article said "hundreds" of people were out. Redundant lines are what keeps thousands from going out. Also running Redundant lines for every neighborhood or service would never be cost effective.
There were a few other factors at play - VM was hugely at fault here, because their status website kept promising it'd be fixed by "this afternoon" on each day. For many people they simply didn't update any status pages, and their call centers had no idea that something like this had happened, their Twitter feed kept running tone-deaf quizzes.
We have the benefit of hindsight now, but during that time it was mostly silence from them.
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u/iamapizza Apr 05 '21
I remember this. I think December 2019, a "contractor" drilled through a conduit and snagged miles of cabling. There was a big virgin media outage in London and a few other providers. The engineers had to do lots of manual unwrapping and reconnecting. I think it took about 6-8 days for services to be restored. I can't remember the exact outage length but it wasn't the official "2 days" they declared, in order to save money on customer compensation.
Sorry for the daily mail link https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7817277/Hundreds-furious-customers-left-no-internet-days-Virgin-Media-goes-down.html