I have just been having a spat with my ISP over the quality ofboth the line speed and the service availability, which lately has been goingup and down like a yoyo.
Like most ISP’s, mine operates an FUP (Fair Use Policy). Hmmm. Fair for who? The ISP obviously, because that fair usage policy states that should I use my internet connection excessively, and by excessively they think that 2gig ish is fair, then they will be forced to put me on reduced usage so that it will notinterfere with the other users who are also on the 50 or 75:1 contention thatmost ISP’s operate.
The Office of National Statistics report for September 2006 shows that 75.2 percent of all people in the UK that now have internet connection have broadband, and presumably an FUP to contend with.
Note: the ONS does not actually say how many people are connected, only that of those that are, 75.2 pct are on broadband, the rest being on metered 17.8pct and unmetered 7.1pct dial up.
Are we so accepting in the UK of poor quality, high pricing and low usage as the norm for our existence on the net that we fail to notice what is happening elsewhere, and demand better from our ISP’s. Perhaps our press should be informing us better.
If we go to France for instance, we can get up to 20m/sec broadband as standard, with no FUP, free VoIP, unlimited national and international calling (for an extra 5€ per month), a free UK2U UK phone number so your family and friends can phone you at UK local rates all for 29.90€ per month. Yes, Euros not Pounds.
There is an interesting offering for UK expats in France from Teleconnect France on http://www.teleconnectfrance.com/Highspeedinternet.html
This comes with a guaranteed uptime of 97pct, and a guaranteed speed, rather than the best efforts policies operated in the UK.
Is it not time that we started to demand European standards here in the UK for all our Internet Services.
As a Project Manager who has been in the
contract market for a long time, with a CV full of blue chip clients, I get
regular calls from ‘Recruitment Consultants’.
I am finding that more and more I am being
offered roles as an engineer, technical help desk support, sales, more often
than not on a remarkably low salaried permanent basis, and this is beginning to
get my goat now.
I am seriously getting the needle with agents
who call themselves ‘consultants’, who are going to take anything between 10
and 50pct of the money offered by the client, but who do little more than scan
C.V.’s which are sent to them and do word searches, then have the affront to
offer me jobs that have nothing to do with what I do, and insist that it’s a
‘fantastic opportunity’.
How many times have you been asked to
re-write your C.V. to suit the clients needs better? i.e. we cannot see the
word Citrix in your CV enough times.
Apparently, it would appear that the
majority of HR departments do exactly the same, scan and word search, looking
for the key words that fit the job spec, which was probably written by someone
that doesn’t even know what the candidate is really going to do.
It would appear that virtually no-one reads
a C.V. anymore.
But hang on…. Isn’t that your job, isn’t
that what a recruitment consultant is supposed to do, I mean, what do you
expect to do for your money?
I can still remember the days of being able
to call into a recruitment agents office, sit down with a consultant, get some
assistance on how best to write your C.V., and that consultant would work on
your behalf to find the best suited role for you, and you would build a
relationship with that consultant, do more than one contract assignment with
them, and get to know them as friends as well as agents. They were just that. Your Agent.
Those days alas are now long gone, the
world of recruitment is now like so many other things, just electronic mass
market sales.
First come first served, best electronic
fit based on key word matching. Turnover
not service.
Just another part of our world where
quantity not quality seems to be the driving factor, profits not people, and
with tools such as iProfile, the contractor who does not fit exactly, no matter
how good they are, no longer stands a chance.
