{"id":799,"date":"2003-09-08T23:44:47","date_gmt":"2003-09-08T23:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-799.html"},"modified":"2014-01-03T17:08:23","modified_gmt":"2014-01-03T17:08:23","slug":"bt-midband-just-like-ordinary-dial-up-only-without-the-good-bits-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2003\/09\/08\/bt-midband-just-like-ordinary-dial-up-only-without-the-good-bits-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"BT Midband: Just like ordinary dial-up, only without the good bits (part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

My crazy rant about BT’s Midband internet service<\/a> yesterday wasn’t completely out of the blue. I have spent time with the product. Too much time, in fact. It took me about an hour to wade through BT’s hundreds of customer service and sales numbers to even order<\/em> Midband. And then I spent three and a half fruitless hours on Saturday trying to get it to work. And failing.<\/p>\n

I’m going to be cutting and cruel to BT in the rest of this article, but I do have to give them some credit up front: after spending 20 minutes on hold to their dedicated Midband Technical support help line, the woman I spoke to was top notch<\/em>. I’ve dealt with a lot of helpdesk operators in my time, but never has first-level support been so clued-up and helpful. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe the Midband people are all like this. Whatever the case, I was very impressed. (The conclusion we eventually came to was that there was too much line noise. An engineer is being dispatched to investigate.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, on with the disaster movie.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ordering Midband<\/h4>\n

If you want to order BT Midband, there is an initial hurdle to overcome: BT doesn’t seem to want to sell it. Oh, you can visit their Midband web site<\/a>, and read up on the service. They even helpfully include a “call me now” or “call me later” option where you can ask for a customer sales representative to ring you and discuss options. But unfortunately these options never seem to work. I got a “sorry, this service is unavailable right now” message whenever I tried them.<\/p>\n

So do they list a number for you<\/em> to call instead, rather than waiting for them to call you back? No. You have to go through their normal customer service and sales phone lines. If you’re lucky, you may get to speak to someone who know what Midband is, but they’ll most likely tell you that you have to call a different number to order it. I had to make four phone calls before I found someone who a) knew about the product, and b) was in a position to sign me up for it. And no, the three previous people couldn’t just transfer my call to the different department. I had to hang up and redial each time.<\/p>\n

(Just for the record, in case you were wondering: I am actually hooked up to broadband in my own home. I’ve been doing this work on behalf of my parents’ business. Despite living and working a mere ten minutes drive North of Perth, in a brand new estate of big, modern houses, where stacks of people seem to want broadband, they can’t get it. BT hasn’t even set a trigger level<\/a> for upgrading their exchange.)<\/p>\n

The mysterious price differential<\/h4>\n

If you order midband for business, it costs \u00a343 per month. For home users it costs \u00a335 per month. No-one at BT has been able to explain what the difference is between the services, apart from price. Based on all the on-line documents I’ve read, there is no difference<\/em>. No difference in product, no difference in service, no difference in support options, no difference in the number of free hours offered each month. (150, in case you were wondering. It’s pay-as-you-go after that. You didn’t think that a mere \u00a343 per month gets you unlimited usage, did you?)<\/p>\n

As a business user, of course, you can’t order the “Home” product. They just screw you for an extra \u00a38 per month because they can!<\/em><\/p>\n

The business service that isn’t<\/h4>\n

The Midband software won’t install on Windows 2000 Server<\/a> editions. It runs happily on Windows 98, Millennium, 2000 Professional, or XP Home or Professional. But try it on any other operating system (presumably even the more recent Windows Server 2003), and it will tell you (almost) politely to bugger off. If you want to run midband on Win2K Server, you therefore can’t use the USB interface that comes as default with the product. You have to buy an ISDN terminal adapter instead, install all the relevant software, and configure it appropriately, all by yourself. This method of access is possible, but BT won’t offer you any support with it.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t mind this so much on a Home product, but what software does BT think that businesses use? Say you’re a small business. Say you have a number of PCs in your your office, and a server<\/a> that ties them all together. Do you maintain separate phone lines so that every PC can access the Internet independently? Or do you have some kind of internet sharing system in place, running through your shared server? The latter option doesn’t sound too unreasonable, does it?<\/p>\n

Also, does any of the marketing material tell you it doesn’t support Win2K server? No. When I ordered the service, did I ask if it would work with Win2K server? Yes. Did they tell me I’d have to go out and buy an unsupported Terminal Adapter, and that I’d be on my own as soon as I tried to plug in to the service? No.<\/p>\n

Stupid installation tricks<\/h4>\n

When a BT engineer upgrades your phone line to ISDN, they will leave behind an installation CD. A few days later, you’ll get another CD through the post, this one purely for the Midband product that rides on top of ISDN.<\/p>\n

All the installation documents exhort you to install all the software from the first CD, and then all the software from the second one. If you deviate from these instructions, fire and brimstone will rain down upon the land, your children will become barren, and all your pets will start howling and butting their heads against the walls until they bleed from their eyeballs and make a mess all over your carpet.<\/p>\n

In the case of troubleshooting, the first question the FAQs and support documents ask is “Have you installed CD 1, and then CD 2?”<\/p>\n

Care to guess what’s the first step of the CD 2 installation process?<\/p>\n

It gets you uninstall all the software packages that were installed from CD 1. It warns you sternly that if you fail to do so, your midband connection may not work.<\/p>\n

Yes, really.<\/p>\n

Diallers. How quaint. How totally useless.<\/h4>\n

The documentation does not give you any phone numbers for creating your own dial-up network connections. Instead, you have to user their dialler software. You get two dialler programs: one for use with your free hours (150 per month), and one for use after that time. The two diallers connect to two different access numbers: one for your free hours, and another for your pay-as-you-go time after that. YOU<\/em> are responsible for knowing how much of your free time you have used. BT, however, kindly provides a web page with a usage meter, and suggests that you set this as your home page.<\/p>\n

How do most people have their home internet set up? Dial on demand. You set a default connection, and your PC will dial it when needed. If you’re a business, you’ll have a router\/server set up to dial on demand. How does dial-on-demand know whether you’ve used your free hours? It doesn’t.<\/em> If you want to use dial-on-demand, and you regularly use up your free hours, then at some point each month you’ll have to manually change your default connection from one to the other, and then remember to switch back again at the start of a new month. Alternatively, you use the dialer programs whenever you want to connect to the internet. Who still uses dialler programs these days? BT customers, that’s who.<\/p>\n

If you have one user connecting to the internet, that’s one thing. But if you’ve got a server set up to share the internet connection (using Internet Connection Sharing<\/a>, or some other proxy\/router software<\/a>), you need automatic dialling. Is this just a way for BT to stop people sharing their connections? As with the lack of Windows 2000 server support, this raises the question: does BT think business still have a separate phone lines and internet connection for each user?<\/p>\n

I was only able to get hold of the actual access numbers by calling technical support. If you have these numbers, it is possible–and in fact very simple<\/em>–to set up an ordinary dial-up networking connection with the ISDN line. Apart from Compuserve<\/a>, all the ISPs I’ve ever used have assumed that users are capable of doing this for themselves, and they include full instructions for doing so. Why? Because using diallers is unnecessary, and makes it a damn sight harder to troubleshoot any problems you’re having.<\/p>\n

Also, what happens when you dial the free access number, and your free hours are used up? Does it disconnect you? Do you not get connected in the first place? Does any of the on-line documentation say? Pfffft.<\/p>\n

HOW THE HELL CAN ONE OF THE LARGEST TELECOMS COMPANIES IN EUROPE NOT WORK OUT A SYSTEM THAT LETS YOU DIAL A SINGLE NUMBER, AND THEN BILLS YOU APPROPRIATELY?<\/p>\n

Stupid usage limits<\/h4>\n

Heavily used dial-up services often cut off your connection after you’ve been on-line for two hours. You can re-connect immediately again, though. This is a mechanism to stop people from hogging scarce resources, like incoming dial-up lines.<\/p>\n

Midband does this, too. It doesn’t matter that you’re paying more<\/em> per month for what is billed as a higher quality<\/em> internet solution. It doesn’t matter that you’ve gone out and bought this service for business<\/em> purposes. You’re still treated like a second-class bandwidth hog, and told to get off after two hours, just as with the worst of dial-up providers.<\/p>\n

Unless you’re using software that allows you to resume file downloads (i.e. NOT<\/em> Internet Explorer), this limits the size of files you can download to 115 MB. That might sound like a pretty big file, but how big is the latest service pack for Windows 2000? 132 MB. Do we see any problems here?<\/p>\n

Buried under its own complexity<\/h4>\n

When the Midband software installs, it doesn’t just install drivers for the USB ISDN adapter. It also leaves you with four<\/em> different ISDN configuration and monitoring applications:<\/p>\n