Warning... Rant Approaching!
A couple of months ago I installed a Vodafone Gateway in my house. That is their femtocell product that will give a better mobile signal in a small area by using the broadband line. All was well... the signal to my phone was drastically improved and call quality was great. That is until a week ago. All of a sudden people were complaining about very poor call quality. I thought it was strange as I could hear them perfectly but they could not understand me.
So I called Vodafone to ask about any potential issues with the gateway. They asked me to run a speed check which showed I had a reasonable download speed but a shocking upload speed (4.1M down, which is much better than usual but 210kbit/s up). They advised that you need a minimum upload speed of 300k for the gateway to function properly and that I should call my ISP.
Great, so I get on the phone to BT. In India. We go through the usual rigmarole of have I tried this, or done that and what is my set up etc. etc. Until eventually I was told, "OK, I am going to run a test to see what the problem is." Good. After a couple of minutes waiting she came back and confirmed what I already knew but added that they felt the download speed was good (agreed) and the upload speed was in the acceptable range. Again agreed other than the fact that is has been much better therefore surely something must have happened to cause the change. This was met with the immortal quote:
"Yes Sir, but we only help with download speeds not upload speeds."
At that point I gave up!
It amazes me that there can be such a lack of understanding of the importance of both directions of the communications path. In fact there should almost be more focus on upload speed and improving that as more people are uploading large files to sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Flickr.
Rant over. Thank you for listening!
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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I have to add the comment that within an hour of posting this via Twitter @btcare sent a DM asking for info to help resolve the issue. Interesting...
ReplyDeleteDid you get this sorted?
ReplyDeleteI can probably help you with this.