The No Subject Thread - The Bear and Badger

Diluted Dante

Lay your own.

poprock

I’m not chicken.

JMW

Similarly stuck on Virgin as the only fibre provider in the road, and paying a standard £45pm which is too much. I’m trying to get in on the Starlink beta through a contact, but they’ve delayed the UK testing. Tbh that’s not blazingly fast either.

SpaceGazelle

I'm paying £11 for regular fibre, around 35 Mbps.

poprock

I’ve been looking at all the rural broadband options for our place and there’s a pretty simple hierarchy of what each option maxes out at.

ADSL, any old provider = ~20Mb
Satellite broadband = ~40Mb
4G from a mobile provider = ~70Mb
Actual fibre, privately installed = ~300Mb

Theoretically 5G should come in even faster than fibre, but it won’t be reaching rural areas anytime soon.

Private fibre installs are a fucktonne of money, but there’s funding available in Scotland if you live in a location without any.

Because ScotGov failed to get 100% of households on to decent broadband by March 31st 2020, which had been an election promise, they have to offer funding. Our new place is on the schedule to get fibre to the property in ‘late 2021’ at the moment … so we qualify for a £400 grant to help us pay for alternative connectivity in the meantime. Basically that’s money towards a year of 4G to tide us over. I’m more interested in getting actual fibre laid early though … if I can get three or more neighbours to sign up along with us, we then qualify for £6,500 towards the cost of installation. And installation starts around £8,500.

Unlikely

Here's the results of the Which? customer satisfaction survey from earlier this year. I don't think you actually need an account to view this but just in case...

Moot_Geeza

I'm with SSE, heh.

SpaceGazelle

Why are they giving the second best one the thumbs up?

acemuzzy

I'm EE cos it means I get free 4G data. But good to actually see it high up the list! And yes they've been fine...

SpaceGazelle

I've never had a major problem with any of those I've been with, anymore than I've had a problem with say, the water company. Don't Open Reach maintain the system anyway for all non-super fibre stuff?

LivDiv

I have been absolutely fine with Virgin while I've been here.
I was with BT while in London and it was fucking garbage, constantly dropping.
Like you say though, other than Virgin it is all handled by Openreach so differences shouldn't be too big on reliability and speeds. I guess the provided router may make a difference.

Edit
Or do certain providers rent a certain amount of bandwidth from Openreach?

Dark Soldier

We're with Virgin too, max package, its shit hot.

nick_md

I'm with Plusnet. I think I probably pay a bit over what I should at £28 but I've never had any problems. I'm exactly the kinda schmuck they prey on.

LivDiv

I pay about £50.
Thats 100mb, plus the bulk of TV channels and BT Sport.
Although its worth it for 10mb upload speed for work stuff. I also expense half the cost to my business.

Unlikely

Bear in mind this is based on customer feedback, it's not an objective/subjective Which? opinion.

SpaceGazelle

I feel Zen should be really slow, maybe one web page per day, and you should meditate on that page for the rest of the day.

Unlikely

EDIT: This didn't make sense unless you are me.

SpaceGazelle

Jesus I've just realised the beer I'm drinking is 7.2%.

LivDiv

Ha.
I was in that boat the other day.
"Why am I tingly?"

SpaceGazelle

I've only had a couple of cans but I was feeling it so I checked and the abv writing was fucking tiny. It's some new Brewdog stuff I'd not seen before and so I bought a few, and they're 7%+ and 440ml to boot.

LivDiv

Ah yeah, thats the one that caught me the other day!
Luckily I only bought one with some other 4-5%ers.

The only beer I get semi-regularly above 5% is Guiness Foreign Extra. Always just the one mind.

SpaceGazelle

Specifically, it's O_G Hazy and Jackhammer. I suppose the clue is in the name but I rarely take notice of the actual tins anymore except to note I've not tried them.

kneecap

I just got virgin fiber in the house yesterday.

It's faster than the wifi chip on my PS4, laptop and Really shitty phone.

SpaceGazelle

Scary Pumpkins.

https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-carved-pumpkins-halloween/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

poprock

How cute is this? An all-in-one Raspberry Pi desktop computer. It’s like a modern ZX Spectrum. And it’s only £70.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/raspberry-pi-400-review

Could be a nice option for simple retro/emulation.

djchump

It’s awesome that they kept the GPIO headers as well

GooberTheHat

I might get one of those for isla for her homework. Looks ideal, and she can use it to learn coding or whatever when she's a bit older without me worrying about her trashing the PC.

Dinostar77

So my wife tried this calculator "the great british class calculator", and her results for us as a household were "technical middle class". Which was news to me, as i would say we were working class and id never heard of technical middle class before. Anyway we ended up having a discussion about what "middle class" is. I have my middle class stereotypes that define that class for me: drives a Range Rover, shops at Waitrose, has a holiday home/let in devon/cornwall and goes on holiday abroad at least once a year.

Missus called that all out as rubbish, it was an interesting chat during lunch hour at home yesterday. Her opinion was we are "technical middle class", and she gave her reasons why, which i wont bore people with. But it did get me thinking. Middle class has always been a social strata above where we are (im of the mindset im working class). Its never been an ambition to aspire to middle class, its always been a class for folk better off than us. But according to this survey technically we are middle class. Which is abit of a headfuck for me.

Anyway link below if anyone wants to give it a go.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973

afgavinstan

I'm an emergent service worker, which sounds like a feature in a indie roguelike game.

Unlikely

Dinostar77 wrote:

Stuff

OK, but who really gives a shit?

Howdy, Stranger!

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