[10:00] <zxmpi> allo allo
[13:24] <daftykins> happy Friday, team
[13:25] <zxmpi> bank holiday weekend here so it's extra travelly outside
[13:28] <daftykins> ooh my, against rules or?
[13:45] <zxmpi> country is openish for first time since crimbo and a bank holiday. everyone is on the move
[13:47] <daftykins> is it feeling like a zombie film for you to venture out into the wasteland?
[13:52] <zxmpi> want to get a bit of shopping done but might wait till tomorrow
[14:09] <daftykins> sounds good
[14:10] <daftykins> oy, wealthy client propped up the TV on polystyrene chunks (new TV i assisted in buying for them up at the farmhouse) and a pet allegedly helped knock it over
[14:10] <daftykins> the LCD panel was bowed out on the front and the bezel deformed due to the impact, silly sod tried to push it back into place...
[14:10] <daftykins> *CRUNCH*
[14:10] <daftykins> the image is now missing a large triangle apparently ¬_¬
[14:12] <zxmpi> big and fragile. mounted to a wall would be safer than stacked on wobbly polystyrene
[14:12] <daftykins> yeah, it's all temporary due to their only just having bought the place though
[14:13] <daftykins> i just did a walkaround of the new-new place yesterday too, so awkward because the renting tenant was still present
[14:13] <zxmpi> tv didn't even survive their move in
[14:13] <daftykins> crazy 2 million quid house
[14:14] <zxmpi> so enough room to swing a cat
[14:14] <zxmpi> ...or any other bdsm implement :-P
[14:14] <daftykins> current place is bigger but he wants to shift over for some reason, it's going to be terrible
[14:15] <daftykins> the infrastructure isn't as bad as i had remembered though, (it was his back in ~2006 when i was away at Uni) maybe 1 network point per room
[14:15] <zxmpi> maybe the commute from the bedroom to the kitchen is too far :-P
[14:16] <daftykins> it's gonna be worse, new place kitchen is in the basement!
[14:16] <daftykins> really bad location for broadband too, max option is 40/5
[15:00] <laney> you can probably pay for ethernet/fibre to be run if you've got 2 mil for a place
[15:01] <daftykins> nah, i asked the ISP - they want over £2,300 per month for 100/100
[15:06] <daftykins> nay, £3,200
[16:44] <penguin42> daftykins: I went through the community-fibre-partnership with BT; they wanted about £2700 to instlal it - based on doing about 100 houses
[16:48] <penguin42>  (each)
[18:13] <daftykins> heh wow
[18:34] <arif-ali> or you could go with some local companies that are doing FTTP, I found a local one near me, Pine Media 115/20 is £29.99, which isn't too bad
[18:35] <daftykins> FTTP is in very limited areas and i'm not even in England so not really the same deal
[18:36] <arif-ali> oh, I thought this was a UK channel :)
[18:37] <daftykins> it is, but the Channel Islands are in that vague spot where they're no way big enough to have their own channel - and are just British enough for me to pester this lot
[18:37] <arif-ali> ah, ok :)
[18:37] <daftykins> Guernsey #1 \o/
[18:42] <penguin42> arif-ali: are Pine managing to work in the same area as Virgin and BT ?
[18:42] <daftykins> maybe they're just reselling Openreach's FTTP?
[18:43] <daftykins> hmm up Sheffield way eh
[18:43] <arif-ali> penguin42: I think so, I've not gone that way yet. Based on my understanding is that they use the ducting and BT sections to lay their own fibres
[18:45] <daftykins> nice speed tiers but looks very unavailable right now - https://pinemedia.net/
[18:47] <arif-ali> yeah, still quite new I think, smells very much like digital region, that happen in this area many years back, and that got discontinued after a few years. I'll wait for a bit
[18:50] <arif-ali> if you look at they status over the past month, I can't afford for my www to be down for lengthy hours like it did in S6, https://status.pinemedia.net/. So, I think a bit premature to move yet I think
[18:51] <daftykins> yeah that's far from ideal, are those partial postcodes or their own service area codes?
[18:53] <arif-ali> I presume they're partial, it does say a specific area in S6, but still not ideal. I've only had 4 downtimes in the past 5 years with my current provider, so I'll stay for them for a bit yet
[19:06] <penguin42> arif-ali: although it's been stable for a few months, I went through a few months period of flakyness with Virgin; I bought  a 4G router as backup
[19:08] <arif-ali> penguin42: I tried Virgin 3.5 years ago, cancelled within 14 days. I had spurious SSH timeout issues, which I think was linked o their modem/router. But never went back, as I wanted static IP
[19:08] <penguin42> arif-ali: I don't have much choice here - although having used the 4G router I could live with that
[19:09] <daftykins> HFC is truly trash technology - and lets the operator oversubscribe easy
[19:09] <daftykins> penguin42: it's time to cut that line! it's the only way! 
[19:09] <penguin42> HFC?
[19:09] <daftykins> hybrid fiber coax
[19:10] <penguin42> daftykins: Thing is Virgin gets me 100Mb when it works - and that's more than any other choice here - I've not seen if 5G is actually available
[19:11] <daftykins> i think you said you're sufficiently away from the student mob such that the 'university town' rule i adopted in my head for cable services might not be so bad, but every time i've seen it or visited friends with it, it's dire and unreliable
[19:12] <penguin42> daftykins: I don't have oversubscription problems noticably
[19:12] <daftykins> i used to see the service disappear entirely at about 1am during my own time in Portsmouth but that was over 15 years ago now :>
[19:13] <daftykins> at least once a week
[19:13] <daftykins> obviously i'm not judging from an isolated incident though
[19:14] <penguin42> daftykins: I'm reasonably convinced the problems here are a broken/dodgy piece of fibre/coax
[19:14] <daftykins> what do you see happen and how regularly?
[19:16] <penguin42> daftykins: during the winter it was about once a month but it would take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to fix; when it happened you'd start seeing a lot of packet loss but then combined with T3 timeouts/resync errors on the modem
[19:18] <penguin42> daftykins: So I'm fairly convinced it's a physical level issue
[19:18] <daftykins> must be a nightmare to get them to do anything with the coax link from your property out to wherever it leads, i bet they take a lot of convincing
[19:19] <penguin42> daftykins: It's not clear what they've done when they've fixed it - they've not notcibly dug anything up
[19:20] <penguin42> daftykins: The coax terminates in a fairly near streetbox (not sure which of 2 nearest)
[19:20] <daftykins> no, no doubt not even a proper fix given the repetition
[19:20] <penguin42> problem is I can't tell what it is - coax? fibre? converter?
[19:21] <daftykins> and support won't go into that fine a detail i imagine? or any engineer on a callout?
[19:22] <penguin42> right, *when* I can get through to support I can normally get a fault reference off them, and they might tell me it's an 'area' fault
[19:22] <penguin42> I've not actually had an engineer into the house, wasn't keen on that last winter
[19:23] <daftykins> i'd have thought the internal coax is the easy bit you could re-run yourself and then replace without even telling them, so i'd just try and convince an engineer to investigate the next bits
[19:23] <penguin42> mind you, the last time it happened, I saw a Virgin eng get out of his van nearby and asked if that was why he was here, and then told him my address and told him it was T3 timeouts; and well ...
[19:24] <daftykins> did it go clear over his head? :P
[19:24] <penguin42> I think he might have been OK with it
[19:25] <daftykins> was the gist that he wasn't interested in helping and snubbed you, then?
[19:25] <penguin42> no, I think he might have been OK - I mean it was the last time it happened a few months back...
[20:36] <zxmpi> bing has fallen to the commies www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank+man
[23:09] <zxmpi> terrahawks are go https://www.engadget.com/japan-transformer-moon-robot-171933181.html