if connected

On Saturday my home broadband went down. I switched to mobile broadband using a pre-pay 3 SIM and a Nokia phone, as I had it ready to go for just such situations.

It worked but the experience felt slow. This matters irrespective of whatever the technical speed tests say (300-600Kbps download when I checked). How fast something feels is what consumers care about. I’ve written about this idea here before in more detail.

So, what’s the reason it felt slow? I think because the latency — sometimes call ping — was around 300ms. This is around ten times what a home DSL or cable connection delivers. Also, the upload speed was dramatically worse than the pretty good, genuinely broadband-quality, download speed. The average of three tests was a mere 20Kbps upload speed. For comparison, an old analogue dial-up modem can provide 33Kbps. I wonder sometimes if mobile broadband is really dial-up’s heir rather than home broadband’s cousin.

My other half was waiting at the doctors earlier today. They’ve installed a ticker to announce which person is next when the doctor is free. The ticker also has adverts, one of which proclaimed that the doctors’ surgery has a new website (yay!), but didn’t state an address. Instead, the ticker invited people to ask at the desk for a leaflet about it.

Stone age 1: The Internet banking software of my main bank has no way for an account holder to delete payees, or to rename them. Having searched the interface in vain for this, I phoned them, and they confirmed the omission. The workaround which they took me through was for them to rename the problem payees with “do not use” as part of the name. Madness.

Number 2: My mortgage bank needed to re-pay me an amount. Rather than reimburse me electronically, they automatically sent me a cheque. This seems especially odd as every payment I make to the mortgage is via Internet banking. So, I trekked into a branch this lunchtime to pay in the cheque, only to be refused: the cheque is to both named mortgage holders, and so it can only be paid into a joint account. We don’t have one. Argh. They still can’t repay the sum electronically for some arcane reason I don’t understand. Instead, we have to write to the bank, jointly, to ask them to re-issue a cheque in just one name.

Apologies for not putting in the names of the banks. I’m not sure about the wisdom of listing such personal details in public to reduce, slightly, the fraud risk.

1. The more digital stuff you own the more you have that can fail.
2. The more stuff, the more of your time you will be spending trying to resolve customer care problems and fix failures.
3. You own too much digital stuff if you have no time left to have a digital life, due to the time spent fixing things.
4. Warranties, backups and insurance will not give you back the time you wasted trying to talk, or talking with, customer care or restoring your backup.
5. The last failure you had is no guide to the next failure. Never fight the last failure, always be prepared for new ones.
6. The more mobile phones and broadband connections you have the better. One working connection is all you need to be happy, and to contact customer care about the others.
7. The more devices you own the more variery of failures you will enjoy.
8. More devices does not mean you will have a suitable replacement device when one fails. You will discover that all devices are unique in some subtle way that will only become clear when you need that device to stand in for one that has failed.
9. Price and brand are no guide to how likely something digital is to fail. Everyone uses the same underlying components now, often it’s these that are the root of fail.
10. Murphy will play rock, scissor, paper with your digital stuff’s weaknesses: Drop proof items will never be dropped, water resistant ones will never have water spilt on them, and surge protected items will never encounter a power cut.

This post was prompted tonight by a failure of my home broadband, but I’ve had so many fails over the last few years that these rules have been a very long time cooking.

I’m a complete Internet addict. I have been one for over ten years. This is the first time I have acknowledged it.

What are the symptoms? I have the desire to check email — work and home — at all times of the day and night. I want to check unread items on my feed reader, Bloglines. I want to read the news on BBC, the Times, Guardian, FT, CNN, and the rest… even when there is no big breaking story. I was a media junkie. Now I’m an Internet addict.

Tonight I was out with friends. I had the leading edge mobile phone with me, the most capable handheld mobile Internet phone, but it simply failed to sate the need. I love the phone and what it can do but it didn’t make me feel sufficiently connected. I felt Internet cold turkey.

In fact, I had a second up to date smartphone in my bag too, but it wasn’t enough. Today’s mobile phones are massive improvements on those of a couple of years ago, but they can’t deliver the whole Internet, and feed an addiction in the way a PC can. This may be the reason that I’m writing this on a laptop at the end of the night. I tried earlier on an iPhone and hit WordPress application errors…

Jump down to the bullets if you want the really good stuff.

Background – I signed up for a trial of a hosted calendar/contacts/email service a little over a month ago. It was a 30 day trial. We’re very busy at work due to the time of year (economy has had no impact on work load yet) so I tend to have time to do chores at weekends but not in between them. On a Sunday I recalled the trial was due to end in the next week or so. I liked the service and wanted to take out a subscription. I logged in, checked the trial expiry, which was that day.

Things to do if you want to have no sales:

1. Don’t send a reminder “your trial is about to end, here’s how to buy” email.
2. Offer a calendar app with a trial, but don’t put a reminder in the calendar about  the end date.
3. Don’t have working links to the online ecommerce system for users to buy the product.
4. Don’t have support working on a Sunday.
5. Do lock the customer’s account on a Sunday so they can’t access the service that they’ve tried and failed to pay you for.
6. Don’t tell your support staff how to take payment details over the phone.
7. Forget to ask which card type it is and what the cardholder’s address is.

As of today, it’s nine days since the Sunday in question, and they’ve still not taken my money.

This may become a regular series. O2 is likely to be next up.

My other half’s old Nokia phone is stuck in headset mode so she can’t hear any calls. Happened after 8 month old Zachary had had a little play.

She Googled the symptoms, as I’d recommend everyone to do, with any tech problem. If there’s an actual error message, even better.

Anyway, there are 28,500 results for: “nokia phone stuck headset baby.”

Online you’re never alone with a problem. My favourite comment, “mine kept doing this eveytime my baby girl gave it a suck!! worked once it dried out.” Main suggestion if that doesn’t work – hasn’t for us – are to clean the connectors at the bottom with an old toothbrush. We’ll try later on when she returns with the problem mobile. For now, it’s still good for texting.