UK telecommunication News

Why are we waiting….Oh! Why are we waiting?

More and more complaints are coming in from subscribers who call BT Call Centres concerning the amount of time they are kept waiting while pressing buttons or listening to a nauseating electronic voice every few seconds telling one they are busy. When you do get through you invariable are told that you are through to the wrong department and will be transferred to yet another queue!

I have experienced this just this week when calling BT and spending 45 minutes just hanging on, I would have hung up but wanted to see just how long I would be kept waiting and yes when I did hear a human voice at the other end I was told I needed to speak to another department and would be put in a queue.

Just a few weeks ago, I was waiting for a new line to be installed after moving house, and the word is I was waiting and waiting. I rang from my mobile phone to be finally told it was there new outsourced sales team that handled new connections, again a queue, fortunately the deal I have on my mobile meant that on a Monday I have freedom of use otherwise either it would have cost a fortune for the call or I would have hung up and possibly still been without a land line. Of course, BT was still trying to get me to pay advanced line rental for my old property even though they had acknowledged that the service was to be discontinued from the day of my move.

Although at the time one feels it is only happening to you but apparently, I am not the only person who has had this experience with BT. BT blames a new “customer management system” for the chaos. “While this new system beds down a small number of customers have had problems getting through,” says a spokesman. The telecoms regulator Ofcom insists it’s not its business to monitor complaint levels or to offer opinions; Otelo, the telecoms ombudsman, says it only considers complaints individually and so, it seems, no one is interested in dealing with BT’s service support.

Manchester is Wi-Fi Capital

Following a pilot scheme in Milton Keynes and Warwick, Pipex Wireless under its new name of Freedom4 has announced plans but not prices to launch its Wimax service in Manchester later this year. It is also planned to roll the service out to 50 cities country-wide.

The IEEE wireless standard has a range of up to 30 miles, and can deliver broadband at around 75 megabits per second. This is theoretically, 20 times faster than a commercially available wireless broadband.

This extension provides for non-line of sight access in low frequency bands like 2 - 11 GHz. These bands are sometimes unlicensed. This also boosts the maximum distance from 31 to 50 miles and supports PMP (point to multipoint) and mesh technologies.

Wimax is seen as the successor to Wi-Fi which is measured in feet rather than miles, offering data rates in excess of 10Mbit/sec in either direction as opposed to fixed-line links that usually offers an uplink at a fraction of the speed of the downlink.

As it is a joint venture with Intel, we will see lap tops being produced with both Wi-Fi and Wimax access.

Coincidentally BT announces…..

That it is to create a UK-wide urban Wi-Fi network by asking its broadband customers to share their wireless broadband connections with all and sundry.

Spanish based FON has a worldwide network of around half a million users who offer their wireless broadband connection to passing traffic. BT is offering free connectivity to BT’s UK Wi-Fi Hotspots as well as the FON network worldwide to any subscriber who joins the scheme Hotspots. If it is successful, it would mean that laptops and devices like iPhones could connect on the move making a viable competitor against mobile broadband.

Faster Mobile Uplinks

A demonstration this week of the High Speed Uplink Packet Access link showed that cellular links of up to 2Mbits.sec is a step closer. The 3.5g service has been available for a while now but the top speed has only been available on downlinks.

In Barcelona, a Canadian company has been demonstrating a new card which supports high data rates in both directions. As users rarely get the higher speeds to be more realistic one could expect real world speeds of 400-600 kbits/sec.

Even at this speed users who need to upload large files of data would be well satisfied after all I am old enough to remember that was the speed of ADSL when we first experienced it, and to have it on a cellular connection…. Well that’s progress.

Although the card is designed to go into laptops the technology can also be applied to smart phones.

There was no mention of when the service would be launched in the UK.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 6:44 am and is filed under Telecommunication News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.