Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Weaver]

What could your ISP do to help hard-pressed users in the current pandemic crisis?
Especially homeworkers and those financially ruined

I sent a list of suggestions to my ISP, who appealed for suggestions from customers.

[chenks]

they should do nothing more than what they already do, which is the provide the service that is being paid for.
ISPs aren't there to help out the financially burdened (just like any other business isn't either).

[niemand]

Just work. That's it. Be a solid ISP.

[gt94sss2]

I sent a list of suggestions to my ISP, who appealed for suggestions from customers.

What sort of things did you suggest?

The big telcos, ISPs and mobile firms have introduced a variety of measures such as lifting bandwidth caps, capping costs and giving PAYG customers extra minutes.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/03/mobile-firms-and-uk-isps-commit-to-protect-vulnerable-users.html

[sevenlayermuddle]

As if on cue, just popped up on BBC web page.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52091359

Coronavirus: UK broadband data caps removed during pandemic

[Weaver]

I made the following suggestions :

• Is there anything that AA can do about charges on AA 4G SIMs for people working at home and people who now have no income because of COVID-19? Obviously this has to be without hurting AA.
  
  AA told me something I didn’t know: they did reduce the costs a couple of weeks ago a bit. They said "they are not that many people using them for general internet access though, they are more widely used in specialist devices such as monitoring stations etc." But I use AA 4G data all the time when away or in hospital, in my iPad and in my portable 4G-to-802.11n router. AA set to contact them if I do go into hospital then.
  
  I think the price reduction on AA 4G data SIMs’ traffic was a reduction down to 1.75p/MB from iirc 2.0p/MB. Very welcome but it’s still horrendously expensive imho.
  
  
• Similarly, anything that could be done about high daytime rates on the ‘units’ tariff for homeworkers and users financially impacted?
  
  
• What about a help guide to blocking eg COVID-19 scams in your email feed? A how-to ?
  
  I didn’t manage to persuade them on this point. "Hopefully they are getting picked up by spam checking, I've not seen any myself though."
  
  
• Or even better a new one-click quick access tool that adds email blocks for your choice of keywords in the subject and also your choice of from-addresses and so this means users don’t have to find this function buried very deep in the control server clueless.aa.net.uk?
  
  I didn’t manage to persuade them on this point. "Keyword blocking can create lots of false positives though - you wouldn't want to block all email with covid-19 in..."
  
  
• Would it be possible to publish a centralised collected list of nuisance/spam/scam email blocks, ie email addresses and email subject
  keywords, collected from all users and made available to plug into the above tool so that one click optionally adds a suggested list of
  blocks? This would provide advance protection so would be most valuable. Should have an opt-out for users who don’t want to contribute/share their blocks.
  
  Reply: "There are already general block lists is use - DNS blocks and so on, so these types of emails would get picked up by them too."

[niemand]

One obvious suggestion for A&A would be to stop metering/capping or massively reduce the unit cost on the metered packages.

If they can't afford to with their current network and system replacing it with one with a lower cost per Mbps/month carried might be a plan.

I struggle to believe that other ISPs smaller than them are able to do so and stay afloat while they aren't. If their network is hamstrung by the Firebrick fixation time to rethink.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I think the price reduction on AA 4G data SIMs’ traffic was a reduction down to 1.75p/MB from iirc 2.0p/MB. Very welcome but it’s still horrendously expensive imho.

Indeed, considering that both my O2 and Three PAYG SIMs are 1p/MB and that already seems expensive to me.

Although as expected, it seems new customers the price has gone up, presumably to pay for 5G.

Three for example have just upped their PAYG prices from 3p/minute, 2p/text and 1p/MB to 10p/minute, 10p/text and 5p/MB.