Telecon

Recently I moved house and one of the many joys which come with this activity is the ritual known as The Moving Of The Internets.

Back in the day, when I was relatively young and the tech younger still, you could understand a change such as moving from a readily available technology like dialup to a faster type of connection taking a bit and it did, usually about a month or so.

Who wants to venture a guess how long it took in 2016, in my new house with it's already installed fibre and with my provider's gear arriving in the mail within the week?

If you said "exactly the same time" you've either recently moved yourself or you are an apt student of big corporations of the telecom kind.

To fill the gap left by this, I tried tethering through a new data speed option on my mobile. After all, my provider for that had been busily advertising it as being freely available to everyone on their network, so why not take advantage of this service?

You know how this is going to end right?

To be fair, the "service consultant" I spoke to assured me it would work great, as soon as I switched to their more expensive plan. If only that man had been in charge of the marketing effort I'm sure this unfortunate misunderstanding could have been avoided.

I'm not saying telecoms are all a bunch of greedy, customer-hostile cartelists or that they're all trying as hard as crowd favourite Comcast to impress the World's Worst Corporation judging panel though. But it didn't exactly leave me in the optimal state of mind for yesterday's news that EU telcos have offered the European Commission that they could ramp up their effort to roll out 5G, if only the Commission would water down net neutrality for them.

I hope the EC has some interesting upgrade options available for them. Preferably involving words like "service" and "competition". And a free dictionary to look those up in, perhaps.