Posts by The Splund

I too am on the fibre trial in MK...

...and I get 12-15 Mbits upload about 60 Mbits down. My install took about a month as the BT Openreach engineers had to contend with two blocked ducts and one with a sharp right angle at each end which they couldn't getthe cobra down never mind blow fibre.

Through it all, the engineers were cheerful, friendly and helpful (as well as determined) which is what I've always found BT engineers to be.

The rubbish bit of BT (in my experience) are BT retail broadband who never know what's going on and aren't helpful at all. To the extent that while I was a BT broadband customer (with 1 Mbit down and 512k up) I couldn't sign up to the FTTP trial with them even though I knew there was fibre in the street outside my house.

So I switched to Andrews & Arnold who got me on the trial and have been nothing short of brilliant since.

So not all parts of BT are the same - and at least they are investing in these trials, which is more than I see the likes of Virgin Media doing.

A pint 'cause I like beer.

Ahead of its time

I have a MessagePad 110 running 1.3 which still works. This article inspired me to get it out, dust it off and fire it up. Interestingly, it doesn't suffer from the 2010 problem mentioned. It's also been sitting in a box for years with no batteries inserted, but fired straight up when plugged into the mains.

The Newton was way ahead of its time. It needed a faster processor and better power consumption and it would have been great. As it was, it was useful to me until I filled it with data and finding something got waaayy too slow (like a minute to search for an address or note).

Nice article. Interesting piece of nostalgia. Still have the packaging for mine, complete with back-of-box blurb touting the 2400 baud modem :-)