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[Weaver]

I defer to Rizla. My ignorance of Scottish politics knows no bounds, not helped by my being a foreigner only having been in Skye for 17 years now. I just wrote "government" leaving it intentionally vague, shorter than writing "the bottomless cash pot" (ha ha).

In the past no one ever voted Labour over here, it was always either LibDem (for the candidate) or just possibly SNP.

There are a lot of suffering miserable people over here, stuck with Internet that is crappy 0.5 - 1.0 Mbps is not untypical. The don't even know it could be >25 times better for the same money, if they were just to move a nearly a hundred miles east. It simply isn't right. And I'm sure most would agree. The government(s) up here should be doing the necessary for only those in most need and then anyone else afterwards.

I do _so_ apologise for hijacking this thread. Perhaps an admin would split off / move this recent section suitably, if the Communist Manifesto [ :-) ] considered worth saving.

I worked for local people doing Internet installs for around eight years until my health failed. I saw a lot of unhappy people and the injustice has now got at least three times worse.

[guest]

Technically I believe the expenditure falls into two "pots" of money :

1) DEL - Department Expenditure Limits which is money the Scottish Govt control. ie they can to some extent choose what to spend it on. Little/none of this is spent on reserved matters other than compulsory spend like maintaining the parasites income (Crown Estates);

2) AME - Annually Managed Expenditure which is wholly controlled by Westminster. The current figure for "Infrastructure, Investment & Cities" within that spend is £0.

The reason nobody up there ever voted Labour in the past is simple - Labour in Scotland were mostly Catholic & hailed from Eire (my granny came from just outside Dublin) whereas the West Coast/Western Isles were/are mostly wee frees (Free Presbyterian Church). Its six of one, half dozen of the other as to which set of godbotherers are more delusional but suffice it to say that I heard ministers in Lewis preaching that the pope was the antichrist in the early 1990s. The sectarian problem is moot now anyway after the deserved destruction of SLAB in the last general election - one more push next May and they'll be clinically dead \o/

The inital problem with BB up there was that BT stated categorically (no caveats) that they would never install ADSL in the Western Isles or North-West Scotland & this triggered a situation where HIE stuck their noses in & came up with "Connected Communities" - a wireless system largely funded by EU money. Then BT came back into the game & did their usual "lets screw over any local/small suppliers who dare to do what we say can't be done". Result is as BT hoped for - a fragmented mess which will take years if not decades to sort out.

* rizla comes from Lewis in case people wonder how I know all this & live in Leicester

[Weaver]

@rizla - A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh, a Rizla a charaid, ma-tà?

[guest]

Yes but its been more than 25 years since I used it on a daily basis and I wasn't a native speaker past the age of 3 as I spent the first few years in Glasgow (speaking Gaelic in the early 1970s was positively discouraged by the establishment). Rusty is not the word

For those wondering, he just asked me do I speak Gaelic, or a direct translation would be "Then do you have Gaelic rizla my friend?"

Amusingly I remember my mother (native speaker) struggled with the Skye dialect - I was wondering whether ma-ta was slang as it'd always be written ma tha in the Western Isles

Oh and for anyone wondering, no I can't understand Irish Gaelic as most of it is gibberish

[Weaver]

In Skye you hear ma-thà a lot too, I'm just a bit old-fashioned. Three of my teachers were from Lewis, and others from Skye, South Uist, Harris, Glencoe and from Argyll. So my Gaelic is an awful mess, mostly bits of Argyll mixed with Harris. I wish I had learned one proper undiluted Skye Gaelic dialect.

A few of my neighbours right next door here in Skye are extremely fluent native speakers, and very willing to talk to me, thank goodness. But they are all very elderly which is frightening.

When I was working as a consultant locally, I had quite a few Gaelic-speaking customers most of whom preferred to speak English, sometimes because of all the computer jargon. One couple though, who live in Beàrnasdail up towards the north end of the Island always were much more comfortable in Gaelic and relaxed visibly when I switched from English.

One of my neighbours in the village here has very poor English and she really struggles, again, relaxes greatly if I can persuade her to switch from English to Gaelic, but for all I know she wants to keep trying to practice her English which is very slow and halting, even though she understands it well.

Apologies for drifting so ridiculously far off-topic.

[guest]

Ah you had a Hearach as a teacher - they'll probably have told you that everyone else is doing it wrong & they're usually right

I had a Hearach prepare me for the mod (singing & poetry, seems like a lifetime ago) and it annoyed the hell out of my mother (who was a Niseach) as the teacher said everyone in Lewis "slurred their words". You can imagine how that went down at home She (the teacher) had choice words for people from Skye - can't spell never mind talk and everywhere south of North Uist was dismissed as "Catholics, mainly bog-Irish & illiterate".

Didn't win but came above Karen Matheson (Capercaille) in the "learners" solo singing so there was probably something in it as I was never in her league. I suspect she'd have done a lot better had the mod been elsewhere.

I think we must win a prize for the most OT thread this year

[Weaver]

> I think we must win a prize for the most OT thread this year

S' e an fhìrinn a th'agaibh, gu dearbh.

[guest]

...and to translate for the rest....

"Indeed, its the truth you have"... (literally - you have the truth indeed but in English more like "That's right indeed")

We'll just quietly get our coats peeps

[burakkucat]

b*cat was sufficiently amused to see if an old Babel-fish could cope . . . only to find it had been washed out to sea by waves of Google. Undeterred, he asked Google Translate for an opinion --

A Gaelic tongue of you, to Rizla to tis ma-ta?

S 'e the named male to th'agaibh, absolute gu.

[Weaver]

If I had been on the development team for Google Translate, I would hang my head in shame.

[AArdvark]

b*cat was sufficiently amused to see if an old Babel-fish could cope . . . only to find it had been washed out to sea by waves of Google. Undeterred, he asked Google Translate for an opinion --

A Gaelic tongue of you, to Rizla to tis ma-ta?

S 'e the named male to th'agaibh, absolute gu.

Don't feel hard done by. It is the best Google Translate can do !! 

Try slightly more well know languages to 'English' and the results are not much better.
For a laugh try doing a 3 language translation i.e. French to Russian to English or some such, it is hugely entertaining 
(Simple pleasures  )
 
I do wonder if Google Translate has been made 'worse' to encourage sales of Language Translation s/w and Services.
(Obviously, Google will have been paid for this by the Companies winning the business)

A nice way to monitise the 'Free' Google Translate 

[Moderator edited to fix the broken color tag.]

[sorc]

Reverse-powering small nodes in remote/rural areas is what its all about, hence me saying Openreach won't be using it (frankly people in remote areas of the UK are screwed anyway, they're going to end up with satellite broadband "ticking the boxes").

Unless you live in Cornwall and are the lucky 1/3rd for whom Openreach and the taxpayer have spared no expense to give you FTTP - some of which is in town centres, but sometimes you get it even if you live in the back of beyond. I've driven around plenty of ultra-rurality with FTTP manifolds on every pole - some of which don't even appear to have any copper customers (or properties who could take the service), let alone fibre, others apparently only serving a single house - and rarely does there appear to be any overhead fibre coming out of any of them.

Shame Openreach didn't extend it to the other 2/3rds, many of whom live in built up areas, where the ROI is likely to be greater than 0

What's even more curious is that there's the odd appearance of FTTP to a pole or two in a "sea" of FTTC. I assume they are EO lines. Or situations where BT has deployed FTTP to one street (absolutely not EO) but put the rest on FTTC. Or brand new housing estates where Openreach spent lots of money shifting poles around to accomodate new road junctions, then had to pull in new copper for the new homes, but did nothing about FTTP availability - I'd have thought that would be the ideal opportunity to put fibre in the ground

[Black Sheep]

........... or the other more likely option of FTTPoD (on demand), whereby the EU will foot quite a bit of the cost to provide it. We seem to have had a bit of an uptake with this around one rural area on my patch.

Regarding ROI .................the perceived average time it will take to turn investment into profit on rural FTTC BDUK projects, is expected to be 20-25yrs. Which is why every single other bidder invited to partake .... buggered off quick sharp.

What the ROI would be on FTTP, only those at the top of the food chain in BT will know. If it isn't a viable proposition, they WILL NOT do it, their commitment is to their shareholders first and foremost. Blame Maggie.

[sorc]

........... or the other more likely option of FTTPoD (on demand), whereby the EU will foot quite a bit of the cost to provide it. We seem to have had a bit of an uptake with this around one rural area on my patch.

If you're replying to me (and the weird availability of FTTP in Cornwall), it all appears to be bog standard FTTP, not on demand. Which would explain why no one actually appears to be connected to the FTTP equipment, and generally multiple poles have it, not just the odd one or two (with the exception I already pointed out).

I know some of the people who live in these situations and BT's various broadband checkers (retail and wholesale) both agree - it's standard FTTP, pay £53 a month plus line rental and you can have 330Mbit Infinity 4 from BT Retail and BT TV and all the trimmings (or lower speeds for less money of course - which FTTPoD does not permit)

That said, there is some curious FTTPoD availability here. Some exchange areas have it (like mine, and has done for years), others don't - FTTC otherwise available of course. I have no idea how BT arrives at that decision. In one example of "FTTP in an FTTC area" I don't think FTTPoD is even available to the FTTC customers

Regarding ROI .................the perceived average time it will take to turn investment into profit on rural FTTC BDUK projects, is expected to be 20-25yrs. Which is why every single other bidder invited to partake .... buggered off quick sharp.

But wouldn't the decision to install the larger cabinets in some places suggest that BT expects high uptake? If BT is so cost-conscious they wouldn't pay more than they need to.

You could also argue that no one can really compete with the behemoth that is Openreach - they have the poles/ducts/cabinets/exchanges/backhaul and they already control everything (and there's nothing to stop them from muscling in, such as BT doing their own FTTP in the B4RN service area, or historically finally deciding to do ADSL where others have rolled out wireless). That's why no one wants to try.

What the ROI would be on FTTP, only those at the top of the food chain in BT will know. If it isn't a viable proposition, they WILL NOT do it, their commitment is to their shareholders first and foremost. Blame Maggie.

But they have done it. Just in the places where the expenditure is high and the ROI is low. That's why it makes no sense, and why BT's protestations of "FTTP is too expensive and impractical" make no sense, considering they've proven that they will do it when they want to

[Ronski]

Don't forget that a lot of Cornwall got done early in the process, a lot of other areas were supposed to fttp but BT found it too slow and problematic to install, and thus more costly so switched a lot of fttp areas to fttc.