Posts tagged broadband

Apologies to anyone who got email to moreati.org.uk bounced or a 404 over the last week. I’ve been moving hosting provider, from Dreamhost to Webfaction and ironing out some finer points of DNS configuration – I’m a DBA Jim, not a network engineer.

Thanks to standards and open source software information services are becoming interchangeable commodities, like electricity or water. Increasingly it doesn’t matter which provider one chooses, the differentiators are cost and bundled features. However we’re not totally there, one cannot export a complete domain from provider A and import it to provider B. We may never be there*, a gas service has very little state and very little choice in how the service is presented, everything is standardized. We in the ICT field still invent unique and wacky methods to reach a goal.

Some areas are further behind then others in making a switch easy. In the UK Local Loop Unbundling is in full swing. The incumbent provider – BT – is required to allow competitors’ to provide telephone/broadband by installing equipment in local exchanges. The regulator requires that a transfer from BT to an LLU provider can happen in a matter of days, with minimal downtime. However in a curious limitation it is not possible to transfer from one LLU provider to another. One must return to BT, incurring a reconnection charge and (I believe) a 12 month contract, then migrate from BT to the other LLU provider. How quaint.

* Perhaps the closest we have gotten so far is the J2EE .war file.