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News and Comment March 2022

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31 March - The month end moan

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.

Internet phoneFrom 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?


Smart meterThe 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.


Dolby Atmos LoudspeakerBut 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.

 

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