• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Probably Bye for now...

Steve Maskery

Steve Maskery

Old Oak
Joined
Jul 27, 2014
Messages
2,301
Reaction score
1,237
Location
87290 Laplagne, France
The Internet went down this afternoon. It happens regularly. About 20 houses are affected apparently, so that must mean another village too, as there are only 9 of us here. All but one of us is dead.
My neighbour Eric rang Orange, who assured him that they were doing everything possible to fix it, and hoped everything will be fine by....... June 16.

So right now I've had to walk out of the village, in the rain, to get a pathetically poor mobile signal. It's going to be a long fortnight.
S
 
Might be a while before you can read this Steve. We got fed up with cable fed interweb supply during last autumns storms which took the cables down. Power was sorted in few days but comms took weeks.
We are now with Starlink and have no complaints. Standard residential 100mbs service 39€ after the initial 29€ offer. We’ve also ditched the land line which took a leap of faith as we barely get a 3g mobile signal let alone 4 or 5g.
 
But, in all seriousness though. Well done holding fast to your principles. I also try to do my bitn(in my case, China and Temu/Shien/sh**. Didn't even know Starlink was dishing out Internet to everyone now!!

Hope you manage to get signal sorted soon mate.
 
HdV said:
Nope, not daft at all. That is exactly how I feel too. (y)
Click to expand...
True but there is also such a thing as ‘Cutting off your nose ….’.

I respect Steve’s decision but having had a fair few outages, the amount of research etc we both do using the internet, we run both Gigaclear and Starlink. Minimal mobile coverage and/or a landline that is more noise than signal mandates that.
 
we're all thinking of you and if the block you walked down is perfectly square 😃
shafiq said:
we're all thinking of you and if the block you walked down is perfectly square 😃
Click to expand...
Ha! There isn't ANYTHING within a hundred kilometres of here that is square, straight, horizontal or vertical!

Actually, I'm quite pleased with how I'm coping. I can't use my PC, but upstairs in my office and bedroom I am getting a weak but usable signal on my phone. That didn't use to be the case.

S
 
Last edited:
Musk is not the only one providing satellite interweb access Steve,

Internet par Satellite : Couverture Étendue et Connexion Fiable avec Orange

Découvrez les avantages de l'Internet par satellite avec Orange à travers sa filiale NordNet. Profitez d'une couverture nationale, d'un débit compétitif, et d'une flexibilité sans engagement. Idéal pour les zones rurales ou non éligible à la fibre.
boutiquepro.orange.fr
 
Steve Maskery said:
The Internet went down this afternoon. It happens regularly. About 20 houses are affected apparently....
Click to expand...
I feel your pain Steve. Thanks to RogS's excellent recommendation, we changed over to Zen (updated last week to full fat fibre and a new Eero router) a few years ago, but we regularly used to suffer from 'outages' with our Virgin copper connection. The reason is self-evident from the pic below:

IMG_7686.jpeg

...which is the aforementioned Virgin cabinet on the inside of a sharp 90deg bend on a narrow road, so that as large delivery wagons come round the estate, they naturally enough mount the kerb (there are always cars parked opposite the box) and knock seven shades of the unmentionable out of their cabinet; you can even see the cables inside exposed to the elements - Rob
 
In my defence we have been waiting nearly 5 years for the authorities ( regular ping pong between the infrastructure provider, the ISP and local mairie have left us exhausted ) to dig up the road and free the blockage that prevents a cable being fed from the pole to our house. Even then more than 200m of overhead cables subject to wind blown tree falls would leave us severely vulnerable. I was also not willing to cut down a mature flowering cherry tree to allow an aerial route. As mentioned mobile signal is not good enough for reliable data.
I could have gone to Orange for satellite but their reputation for support and the upfront cost of their hardware put me off.

Yes principles are all well and good and are to be applauded but when left with no choice I have to take a deep breath. It would also be nice not to finance Mr Bezos’ drive to destroy the high street. I suppose I could live in the city or major town, have a choice of fibre broadband band providers, 5g mobile signal and walk or take public transport to every shop I need but alas I also think it is important not to abandon rural life and small villages. C’est la vie.
 
Fully agree with you Andy, as you know I'm in the same boat living rurally. I work from home, as does SWMBO, and we have two teenagers and all that goes with their digital usage, as well as media services moving to streaming, and my only 'physical' internet option is damp aluminium overhead wiring which completely maxes out at 17Mbps (on an excellent day, 15Mbps normally) and 0.5Mbps upload.

This is simply unsustainable for just SWMBO and my work commitments, and unusable when the kids are at home, so my options were 5G or satellite.

I fundamentally disagree with so much of Musk's politics and antics, but at the same time can rationalise that while he is the 'face' of Starlink, it's also a huge corporate and provides me with a source of connectivity that I cannot get in my area without significant extra cost, OR moving house, neither of which are palatable.

Am I compromising my values? Absolutely! Have I worked out by how much and rationalised that to myself? Kind of. Will I move to physical fibre the second Openreach get round to running it up our lane (which according to the Broadband Checker will be during 2026)? Absolutely!

I will possibly upset some people a little bit here though (not intentionally and hopefully you're all a bit thicker skinned than that, we'll find out...), but I do find the pearl clutching on this subject a little condescending and hypocritical (not on this forum specifically, but in life in general), that to a person, almost everyone I've spoken with who absolutely doesn't want to give Musk their money either has very fast wired connectivity so it doesn't matter to them, OR, doesn't have the same moral compass when it comes to Bezos and Amazon, who is basically the same man in a smaller shell.

I remove Steve from the above because he IS in the same situation re connectivity yet has (thus far) stuck with his principles.
 
Musk is not all bad. I know he is "touched" but he did come out publicly to say that AI should not be used for military purposes. The things he does are often visionary. He has some disarming opinions, but also has a very logical mind and gets stuff done. I will buy Starlink when they finally drop the premium for living in the south east.

I actually think Bezos is basically a leech that has been highly destructive to our high street businesses and I feel much the same about Zuckerberg. Musk at least creates things that are useful and his development of Tesla, Space X, Starlink and so on are admirable technologically. Ukraine would have really struggled without Starlink. We can argue about X but he believes in and practices free speech / minimal censorship. Maybe his platforms are less of a problem than some of the people who use them.
 
Yep, I don't disagree with any of that Adrian. I thoroughly dislike the rabble rousing and misinformation that Musk spouts, particularly about the 'state' of the UK, of which he clearly knows very little and just regurgitates X based lies, but taking his personality aside, I like what he does with tech, and how he seems to spend his money for technological advancement, not profit. Of course profit is his lovely by product, but he's a bit like Tony Stark in the Marvel world, the tech is the driver and the money is the bonus (or at least that's how I 'think' he works...
 
I think you both make interesting points. We have three tech giants and in the final analysis IMO as to their positive contributions to humanity it's a hard call.

But IMO someway ahead, and despite his drift to the 'dark side' by buying X or whatever it was called before he bought it, Musk has brought a lot of technical innovation.

A long way behind are ?uckerberg (the F is silent) for giving many people depression and anxiety, FOMO, sleepless nights through worrying and a platform for rabble-rousers to abuse

and Bezos for wrecking the High Street and many smaller online e-commerce suppliers.

The world could have done well without the latter two.
 
The debate about Bezos and Amazon is a bit chicken and egg. In my view, many high streets were dying before Amazon came along. In the large town where I live there is no shoe shop, no clothes shop (unless you count the rubbish stocked by Poundland), no hardware shop (the recently opened Boyes is a poor substitute), no stationers or book shop, and no bank. Amazon can supply virtually anything at a competitive price with free delivery the next day. If I was to go to a physical shop and buy what I wanted I’d need to jump in the car and drive up to 15 miles, and even then find that no shop stocked what I wanted. Many retailers have taken the customer for granted for too long.

A lot of people bemoan the demise of the book shop. Well, I much prefer my kindle to a physical book. Easier to handle, has a dictionary, a search engine for various parameters, and I can buy a book for £0.99 when an actual one often costs ten times that.

Bezos’s business model may have hastened the downfall of the high street but certainly didn’t initiate it.
 
It's not just that with Bezos, it's his/Amazon's exploitation of affiliate sellers among other dubious business practices. The daft thing is, a simple Google can find the same products cheaper from the original vendor, you just have to be prepared to spend a couple of mins looking, and that's where he wins, because the large majority prefer the ease of a single place to look rather than the money saved.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top