02 April 2014

Gone Fibre Pro

An upgrade from Sky Fibre Unlimited (up to 38Mbps) to Sky Fibre Unlimited Pro (up to 76Mbps) took effect overnight.

When the order was placed, the estimated maximum download speed given was 56.9Mbps.

This is about what I was expecting, taking into account the distance from the cabinet (about 250 metres), according to this (taken from a thinkbroadband guide):



After rebooting the SR101 this morning, downstream sync speed has gone from 39998kbps to 61971kbps and upstream sync has gone from 9999kbps to 19999kbps.

Over the past 12 months, the average downstream throughput speed has been 37.67Mbps and the average upstream throughput speed has been 9.12Mbps on Sky Fibre Unlimited (as measured by the "Whitebox").

I'm waiting for SamKnows to update the profile of the "Whitebox" so that some proper results can be observed over the next few days, weeks, months!

Thanks to a retention deal though, the cost is unchanged for 12 months.

01 April 2014

Happy 29th Birthday to Speedyrite Limited

29 years ago today, on the 1st April 1985, was the first day of my very first freelance contract assignment (at Tesco Stores plc in Welwyn Garden City) - and Speedyrite Limited commenced trading!

A lot has changed over those 29 years.

Mobile phones were in their infancy - they were about the size of a house brick and had quite a short battery life. Video cameras were massive and shot onto tape - I remember once seeing a Japanese tourist wheeling around what looked like a small car battery mounted on a trolley and connected by a long cable to his VCR camera! Now all replaced by a smartphone more powerful than the computer that sent astronauts to the moon.

Legacy application systems are still around though. The front end access to them may have changed though. Gone are the green screens (mostly), replaced by GUI front ends (not so much screen-scraping as there once was, now developed using more versatile tools). And, of course, access to all that data via a browser interface over the intranet & internet.

I'm still here though...