Unusual failure from Zen Internet

[mtbc]

With my family moving to Dundee, they had expected to stay with Zen Internet who have been competent and responsive over the years. However, installation at the new house failed miserably: after please don't hesitate to respond there was no reply at all to anything further that was sent. Eventually they gave up and went with Virgin Media instead.

It now turns out that Zen had the case assigned to somebody who was on leave so everything just accumulated unread in their personal inbox. They have now got back into work, apologized and initiated a refund but, goodness, it's interesting that their system allows this failure mode, and a surprise to us that Zen managed to lose a customer in this manner.

Virgin have the advantage of not having to rely on BT Openreach so the alternative engineer appointment was effected quickly.

Comments

[wpadmirer]

EGADS! That's hard to imagine!

[andrewducker]

Why on earth would support be dealt with through actual email inboxes rather than queues?

[mtbc]

Good question. Also disappointing there's no failsafe that generally catches customer e-mail has remained unread for three weekdays or whatever, it's not like they were impatient.

[thewayne]

Wow! What an insane system!

We were previously with a cable internet system and they were satisfactory, except for one little thing....

My wife is an astronomer. She is in charge of the crew for a 3.5 meter telescope. Even when she's not working on-site, she's working. And the cable company - unannounced - would take their system down for maintenance in the middle of the night! Who could possibly need internet access at 3am?!

Uh, maybe people who work at night from home?

Meanwhile, another internet provider in the area wired the ENTIRE village (we live on the top of a mountain at 2800 meters or so literally in the middle of a national forest) with fiber to the wall! We went and talked to them and initially got 25/25 internet for about the same as we paid for the cable. They later upgraded us to 50/50 for free. Outages are very rare, on rare occasion the ethernet card on the side of the house has blowed up, conveniently one of their techs lives In The Village and swings by after work and replaces it, so we're never down for longer than a few hours. I think once they had to replace the battery in the UPS that they installed that powers the ethernet card.

[mtbc]

Absolutely. The last person I was just on a video call with is actually someone in Asia who is working nights. That's really great about your village being so well connected, though: sure wouldn't want to pay, say, Viasat prices for a high-latency connection. Coming from Europe, it's disappointing to see how little choice there typically is in the US, generally just a couple of broadband providers for most people, both roughly equally expensive and mediocre, given how the market model here hardly encourages real competition.

[thewayne]

It's really crazy.  I was born here, and people don't believe me when I tell them that we pay the highest prices for cell phones/services and internet and get the slowest speeds and poorest service.  We have three mobile carriers, and a bunch of tiny little 'also rans', and with monopolies like that, there is no competition.  So nothing for them to truly compete against and drive prices down. We were with a cell company called Alltel, the absolute best carrier for rural coverage.  They got bought out by Verizon.  We live in an extremely rural area in Southern New Mexico not far from the border with Mexico.  So the Federal Trade Commission comes in and decides that Verizon getting ALL of Alltel would be anti-competitive and that the Southern NM chunk has to be sold to AT&T! I will be ice skating with Satan before I become an AT&T customer! So I close my account, transfer the number to Verizon, and I've been with them ever since.  They're not the best, but none of them are.  When we flew to Berlin for a cruise from Prague to Berlin, I chose our first hotel to be near an electronics store and a U-Bahn and S-Bahn station.  We get in early in the morning, take a short nap, walk over to the electronics store and get a new sim card for my iPhone 6 and a new phone for my wife as her phone didn't do 4G.  Easy peasy.  And being so close to the trains we road the subway all over and caught the commuter train to the main hub for the real train to Prague to catch the cruise!  We had so much fun over there, and such good food! I did have to get a second sim later as I didn't get nearly enough data for our needs, which were pretty basic, mainly mapping and navigation.

[mtbc]

Wait until you tell people about the healthcare. (-: Even if privately provided, in its current form it suffers the same anti-competition problem. At least the death of 3G means that Verizon is finally off CDMA, I very much need phones that will travel well in Europe and Asia.

Years ago when carriers used to send checks that, if you deposited them, would also switch your long-distance service: we'd always just wait until they send a check larger than the amount we considered they'd last screwed us out of that made us switch. It was like car rental businesses, we'd basically go with whichever screwed us the longest time ago.

Prague's great to visit. I'd quite like to live in Germany - I considered Heidelberg - but, last time I was moving to Europe, the kids were smaller and I thought they'd like English-speaking schools, and since Brexit my US/UK citizenship gets me less far, bah.

Admittedly, when I lived in the Boston metro area, I loved the public transit up there. Whereas, here in Oak Ridge, TN, there is none.

[thewayne]

I am slowly weening my dad away from Canada being a healthcare nightmare, I don't hold much hope for the rest of the country, sadly. The problem, overall, is the profit-driven motive, which is why it needs to be gov't run. There's just too much money to be made from sick people - my last pharmacy who provided my antibody med billed my health insurance over a MILLION DOLLARS in one calendar year!

They didn't get paid that amount, I don't remember how much the negotiated/discounted/etcetered/final price they were paid was. It's a very expensive med. It's taken from plasma donations in the USA, takes over six months of filtering and processing in Switzerland before it is usable by people like me.

Just yesterday I drove my wife to the nearest big town for a bone marrow biopsy, she's been having a problem with persistent anemia. The condition has improved and she's much better, but we're trying to find out why. The hospital wanted $7,000 because the doctor's office hadn't done the pre-authorization with the insurance! She waited for it, and once it got approved, we paid nothing - yet! I have to call same hospital about a $1,000 bill for "facility fee" for her cataract surgery.

It's bloody ruinous!

We enjoyed our limited time in Prague and I'd like to go back and see it again, not on a whistle-stop tour. We were disappointed to find a genuine Mexican food place literally minutes after we finished lunch! That's one place we want to go back to, it looks like genuinely nice food. Apparently a lot of cactus and peppers grow well in Spain and similar regions.

We also really enjoyed Berlin, absolutely loved Dresden! We were "stuck" there for three days: it was the last week in June, and the river level was too low! We had to wait for more water to be released up-river before the ship could continue! But that gave us more time to wander about the city, and that was great. Wonderful place. I want to go back there and also to Hamburg, I have a friend on LJ who lives up there and goes to uni in Iceland. I'd like to live in Hamburg for about a year and photograph it and the area heavily.

This is my photo gallery of our European trip. I really should work on it, more to add and lots to clean up. Basically just throwing up the jpegs and not taking the time to properly process the RAWs. My site also has lots of New Mexico and internal sites of my wife's observatory, I think your geek side might find them interesting.

[mtbc]

Very true! Although I think an important additional piece here is how the corporations have captured the elected officials. After all, countries like France manage for-profit healthcare, it's simply that there's some analog of what the US has called a 'public option' - even one of my jobs in England came with private health insurance. After all, if, as an American visitor, one goes to Europe or Asia for wholly private medicine, one's probably getting fairly comparable treatment at a much lower price. (For major surgery, it's not unusual to get the same surgeon in the same OR, one just jumped the queue.)

One thing I hate here is how the patient is in the middle of the bureaucracy too. The hospital miscoded or insurance didn't pay them? It's up to you to notice and call them both and straighten out what on Earth went wrong this time - and probably at a time you don't exactly feel well! If I recall correctly, medical bills are behind very approximately half of bankruptcies here. And, goodness knows a lot of Americans go without treatment they need, for fear of the cost.

It's funny to move between the US and UK and find that the hot peppers are South Asian instead of Mexican. (-:

Mmmm, they really restored Dresden fantastically after the wartime devastation. I like how you've framed a lot of those shots. (-:

[thewayne]

I'm glad you like my photography.  I try to find interesting perspectives.  Some of the photos are stitches of multiple frames.  I shot a Panasonic Lumix (mostly, but not exclusively) for outdoor shots and a Canon 6D full-frame DSLR 4 with a 17-40 for indoor as the Lumix doesn't go very wide but had decent telephoto capability.  I wasn't going to carry two DSLR bodies and didn't want to carry more than one lens and swap lenses, so I thought a pocket camera one one DSLR and one lens would work well, and they did!  I shot some 1200 images while over there.  And I SO want to go back!  Italy or Scotland are our likely next destinations if we ever get a solid hold on Covid, my wife is a first generation American: her parents came from Scotland in the '50s and she has lots of cousins up there.

The interesting thing about Dresden in WW II is that the town fathers/council/whatever had the foresight to move the vault of the town blueprints out into caves in the mountains!  After the town got bombed smooth, then occupied by the Russians, they said 'Hey, here's the blueprints!  Let's rebuild!' and rebuilding was a cinch! Now here's the interesting thing.  The first thing the Russians rebuilt?  The Catholic cathedral!!! Here's a bit of Prague trivia for you.  Prague was the only major European capital to not suffer serious damage during WW II because they surrendered early on.  Except for one incident during the Dresden bombing!  A British (as I recall) bomber was flying up the Elbe and lost, saw the elbow near Prague, decided it was on target, and dropped its load.  It did some damage, but fortunately was not over the historic district. Another interesting Dresden thing: all of the statues seen are COPIES.  The masters are in climate-controlled vaults underground!  When the ones above ground wear out due to pollution and weathering, they make a new copy and swap it out!  I thought that was pretty amazing.

[mtbc]

Aha, yes, I lived in Perthshire for eight years, there is sure plenty worth photographing even just in that corner, I was there just last month. Some great hikes and it's worth getting at least a Historic Scotland pass.

A lost bomber sounds very plausible. I can't remember how well it improved but there were certainly periods in WWII when many British bombs went well astray of their targets.

I had no idea of the copies of the statues. (-: Amazing indeed.

[thewayne]

I just finished a fascinating book: The Four Geniuses of the Battle of Britain, David Coles and Peter Sherrard. The first genius, I can't name him off-hand, was a grandchild(?) of Watt of the steam engine fame, and the (UK) inventor of radar. The detailing of how it was used and jamming techniques were quite interesting. The other geniuses was Royce of Rolls Royce and his fighter engine development and legacy as he died before the war began, and the developers of the Hurricane and the Spitfire fighters.

I've always been a warbird buff, and I learned a heck of a lot about aviation reading this book! I'd love to read a similar book about bombers and their legacy in the air war. As I understand it, though I've only heard this and not seen it in print, the RAF had a much higher accuracy score as they considered a bomb a hit if they hit within a mile or so of the target, the US Army Air Corps within a block!

[mtbc]

Glad you enjoyed it! The BBC make some decent documentaries about some of this stuff, I think some of them get American dubbing when they're shown here, one can tell because most of the interviewees are from British universities!

I wish I'd gotten more chance to look at some of the museums in Britain already. I used to work near enough to IWM Duxford to get to see Spitfires, biplanes, etc. in the sky sometimes and. more relevantly, not long ago, got to see a Lancaster bomber low overhead, the pilot happened to live in the Lancashire village I was in at the time and was practising for an air show in the region. I've probably gotten to see more air shows and museums here, like the National Museum of the US Air Force, I did a bit of defense contracting with AFMC at Wright-Patterson AFB.

Where I live now, mostly I just see the occasional government helicopter coming over on their way to the Y-12 National Security Complex, which I pass on my commute.

[thewayne]

I was very fortunate growing up in Phoenix.  We had the Champlain Air Fighter Museum in Mesa: one wing was World War I aircraft, the other was WW II fighters!  Sadly, the museum was sold off and the planes dispersed to the four winds,, and that was when I was starting out in photography, those negatives are who knows where.  Next to it was a (then) Confederate Air Force museum that had a B-17 bomber that, for a very small fee ($5-10?), you could crawl through!  And it was air-worthy and went to shows!  We had two air bases, Luke AFB and Williams(?), which later shut down, and I went to air shows there where I met quite a number of very interesting aircraft, including the B-1.  I remember talking to the crew of an F-4 Phantom, it was from a California Air Guard unit that came over the for the weekend.  The F-4 is unique in that the back seater has a duplicate set of controls and can completely fly the aircraft!  Anyway, the plane had a unique tank-looking object under the centerline of the fuselage, but it wasn't a drop tank as those have a different aerodynamic styling.  I asked the pilot what it was.  "Oh, that's a napalm bomb.  When we fly to an air show, we have one mounted and use it as a cargo pod to carry our clothes and stuff for the weekend."  I thought that was a pretty cool peace-time use for a very nasty weapon! But the best thing about Phoenix, for a fan of war birds was being two hours away from Tucson.  Tucson has the Pima Air and Space Museum.  It has over a half dozen B-52s of various types, including one that carried the X-15 rocket plane, it has one or two Presidential Air Force One planes, it has an SR-71, a few WW I flyers, many WW 2 and Vietnam era fighters, a NASA transport that flew Saturn stages to Florida called the Super Guppy, transport and cargo helicopters, and many British and Russian birds. Also next to Tucson, 20 minutes or so South, is the Titan Silo, a retired nuclear ICBM silo turned into a museum and managed by Pima.  The missile is in the tube, very strategically deactivated and carefully watched by the Russians.  I've toured it several times, quite a sobering thing to see.  All of the other Titan silos have been destroyed.  Needless to say, there's great Mexican food in Tucson, also a wonderful used bookstore chain called Bookman's.  They have two locations in Phoenix that I always visit at least one when I'm in town.

I've also been to the Strategic Air Command museum outside of Omaha, Nebraska, which is where I photographed two of the three SR-71s that I have and met my one and only U-2spy plane.  I also met the British Vulcan bomber, sadly when I was last there it had been moved outside.  Still, I spent a lot of time photographing it - it is in very bad need of a paint job!  I understand the last flying Vulcan has been retired, I would have loved to have seen that in the air!  A friend of mine used to live in Omaha and I visited the museum twice.

[mtbc]

That sounds great too. (-: I've never been to Phoenix (nor Nebraska) but I enjoyed visiting Tucson, would have considered living there except the public schools didn't seem great. Definitely good memories of the Mexican food though, including having guacamole mixed table-side from a wheeled cart. I loved the mountain trails in the desert just outside the city, and the clear view of the stars, even our galaxy, at night. I had no idea about the museum there, just that there was very many aircraft in storage, I'd see them driving past the chainlink fencing. Definitely haven't gotten to go to many airshows but I have hopes for the coming years, for some reason in American ones I often most enjoy seeing the A-10's in flight. The Titan Silo sounds very interesting too - if there are now so few then I wonder if that's the same they used for filming Command and Control, I liked watching that.

Used/discount bookstores are dangerous, I keep coming out with unintended books.