It may be laziness but I take the view that anything written on the last day of the
month is a bit of a waste because it is immediately lost by the month roll over;
and speaking of laziness you may have noticed a lack of enthusiasm for blogging this year.
On 17th January
I indicated that I was going to get myself up to date with fibre
internet all the way to my router, ditch BT’s analogue phones (and save myself
best part of £40 a month) and update my 2006 vintage power guzzling plasma TV so
that I could see what licence free video streaming was all about. In the event I
went further and swapped the equally old amplifier to see if the hype
surrounding Dolby Atmos was justified.
Saving £40 a month on a rarely used telephone is always going to be good of
course but of all the upgrades the only one I am really pleased with is the
Atmos audio. So called Hi-Fi has always been an interest after I made my own record
player when I was 14 years old and remember that Dolby Labs first operated out of a building in Wandsworth Road.
Today’s 14 year olds, courtesy of their mobiles and expensive ear pieces, have not got a clue about quality audio and the origins of Dolby is the sort of
story which might find a home on
The Maggot
Sandwich rather than here.
Openreach ran the fibre connection to an inconvenient place which is how I came
to lose an
argument with a ladder but apart from that all was well. I just ran an
Ethernet cable from the Openreach box to my router and it worked. My ISP contact
came out next day to install a newer Cisco router which offered some advantage
or other but I kept the old 80mb/s speed as it is quite fast enough for my needs
and anything more would result in extra charges.
From that I progressed to VOIP telephones or Digital Voice as BT has decided to
call them. To be honest I think it is an abomination but maybe I was given a poor telephone.
In 1962 two things happened in my life; my interest in Hi-Fi led me
into building an FM stereo tuner using the American Zenith GE system which
multiplexed the channel difference signal on to the mono for backwards compatibility purposes.
(The same system as in use today.)
In my youthful ignorance I assumed that multiplexing was
a new fangled idea but I joined the GPO the same year and discovered that they
had been multiplexing voice signals since at least 1936. Voices were restricted
to 3,300 cycles per second (Hertz had yet to be invented) to enable very large
numbers of conversations to be in effect stacked one above the other on a single cable.
An upper frequency of 3,300 Hertz is a long way from Hi-Fi and in theory Digital
Voice should be free of that restriction. Not a bit of it, the audio quality is
muffled and pretty horrible. A matt black phone with matt black buttons is
another abomination (the blue sticker is my idea) as is the fact that the buttons do not auto-repeat so
scrolling down a list of numbers might take 20 presses or more instead of one.
There is no switch hook so if you begin to call a wrong number due to the
inadequacies of the Directory system you can’t just slam the receiver down to
stop it, you have to find the black Call End button in a dark room. Don’t even
mention the crawling around in the roof space running new network
cables for sockets in every room and supplying the Power Over Ethernet (POE); but I console
myself with the nearly £40 a month saving!
Is this something that someone who has not been playing around with wires for 65 years is expected to cope with?
The other venture into the modern age was a Smart Meter. It was the only way to
access the lower tariffs offered by some suppliers to electric car owners. It
was installed on 24th February and still doesn’t work. I think it sends back my
meter readings to Octopus Energy but the internal display operates according to @bexleynews rules. It lies.
The displayed electricity consumption may be correct but the price is not. The total cost over five weeks is £0.00.
The gas is inexplicable too. It shows consumption of between five and 30
kilowatt hours per day which is nonsense. I use very little gas and my boiler has
been switched on on only five occasions in those five weeks. Maybe eight hours in
total as an absolute maximum. Water heating is by solar power except on the dullest days.
Experimentally I have turned off the gas at the main stop cock and it still
shows consumption up to 30kWh a day. The Smart Meter has been a total waste of time
and Octopus Energy are stumped too.
But
this evening I can blast away my woes courtesy of
the late Dr. Ray Dolby’s inventive mind and there is no nagging Smart Meter to tell me how much it costs.
For the record my energy Direct Debit was £77 last October and running a small
credit. From next month I am being asked to pay £178. Far too much of it down to
Ed Miliband’s ill-considered 2008 Climate Change Act made steadily worse by
succeeding Con-Socialist governments.