BBC cripple HD offering to make it fit on Freeview

"Steve Terry" wrote in
:





Not just the UK, i remember in the 1970's to make a phone call in most
Spanish towns you had to find one of the toilet cubical payphones
in the town square and call via an operator.


And for anyone who has seen the short, Spanish film 'La Cabina' , the
chance of you being able to exit the payphone afterwards would be very,
very rare !

(Wasn't this the same in the States where the operator had to hear the
sound of you depositing coins in the payphone before they would put the
call through ?)

"Steve Terry" wrote in message
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"Ivan" wrote in message
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"Steve Terry" wrote in message
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"Bill Wright" wrote in message
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"Kay Robinson" wrote in message
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On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 15:00:36 +0100, "Bill Wright"
sharpened a new quill and scratched:
Of course she had an ulterior motive from the gaining votes aspect.

She would have said that her motive was to make people feel that they
had moved up in the world. If that made them vote Tory then so be it.

You always seem to jump to the defense of the evil witch while still
claiming to be a socialist, something she passionately hated and tried
her damdest (some would say successfully) to destroy.

She wasn't right about everything. As I told you I am a highly rational
independent free thinker, so I see good and bad in all parties.

You're defintely
in 'half a mind' IMO and should stop sitting on the fence.
See above.

The great think Thatch did was put a bomb under a lot of outfits in
this country that were sitting pretty and wanted the status quo to last
forever. I worked as a contractor for local government right through
the period, and believe me the change she forced was staggering. Of
course it's nearly all gone back now to how it was. Another example was
the GPO, who were strangling initiative and innovation in
communications. Remember that you were only allowed to connect an
ansaphone made by a company that was part of a secret price ring?
Ansaphones were £700 for God's Sake. It was the same with private
mobile radio gear. You had to pay many thousands for a simple set up
with one base and say three mobiles. When she deregulated it the prices
dropped to a tenth (yes!) of what they'd been.

It was new technology of the 1980's that liberated telecoms, not BT.
If you doubt that just look at other countries that kept their
nationalised PTTs
they are just as advanced as us, if not more.

After all, after spending millions developing System X, BT chucked much
of that development and went for the cheap option of importing System Y
So don't give me all that balls that BT saved UK telecoms.

They are just another badly managed privatised UK quango that got lucky

Strange though how the kind of things we had endured for years such as
'party lines', six month waiting lists all seemed to rapidly vapourise
into distant memory very soon after privatisation and started to be
replaced with the kind of service and stuff that had been 'accepted as
the norm' for generations over in the States, such conveniences as
multiple telephone outlets and inexpensive modern equipment and phones
that could be purchased in almost any electrical retail outlet, all
miraculously and coincidently started to happen within a few months of
the GPO becoming privatised.
I'll never forgive them for the time that my dad was dying and I was
forced to wait almost nine months for a ****ing 'party line' to be
installed, IMV they were the most arrogant and intransigent shower of of
**** that I ever had the misfortune to deal with, if you think that those
were the halcyon days of nationalisation then all I can say is god help
us.


Not just the UK, i remember in the 1970's to make a call in most
Spanish towns you had to find one of the toilet cubical payphones
in the town square and call via an operator.

The big change was when Ericsson and Canadian Northern Telecom
exported the new generation of digital exchanges around the world,
and all that went with it, like modular sockets and leads, DTMF handsets,
etc etc.

Look at the technology of GSM and 3g, not an ounce of input from BT,
the only thing BT achieved is to flog off Cellnet O2, which epitomises
the true incompetence of BT.




Immediately the GPO was privatised it set a target to abolish waiting lists
and party lines within months, which they achieved, they also allowed
customers to run their own extensions and purchase different types and makes
of (BT approved) equipment from other sources, so why couldn't they have
done this pre-privatisation?
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When I lived in a large flat in Bristol during the 1960s I ran my own two
wire telephone extension from the rear of the flat to the front, several
years later during a visit from a GPO engineer (due to the fact that because
they hadn't left a drip loop on their installation, water had seeped into a
junction box on the windowsill) he happened to notice the extension, on
which he then proceeded to berate us with all kinds of threats concerning
possible 'legal action' for 'tampering with government equipment', socialism
at its best, why would any sane person wish to return to those days?
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Just like you I didn't (and still don't have) much time for BT either,
simply from my own personal experience and what I've heard from others, even
long after privatisation they still don't appear to have shaken off some of
the old traits inherited from their predecessors, maybe it's because they
were such a huge national monopoly for so long that certain attitudes remain
ingrained in the psyche.
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As soon as I was given a 'choice' I left them for United Artists cable back
in the early nineties (which itself has gone through a number of changes and
has now morphed into Virginmedia) and have never regretted it WR to
telephone or broadband.

In article , Ivan
wrote:


Immediately the GPO was privatised it set a target to abolish waiting
lists and party lines within months, which they achieved, they also
allowed customers to run their own extensions and purchase different
types and makes of (BT approved) equipment from other sources, so why
couldn't they have done this pre-privatisation?

most likely because of the dead hand of HM Treasury.

--
From KT24

Using a RISC OS computer running v5.11

"charles" wrote in message
...
In article , Ivan
wrote:

Immediately the GPO was privatised it set a target to abolish waiting
lists and party lines within months, which they achieved, they also
allowed customers to run their own extensions and purchase different
types and makes of (BT approved) equipment from other sources,
so why couldn't they have done this pre-privatisation?

most likely because of the dead hand of HM Treasury.
From KT24


The more i discover, the more i find out it's the Treasury
that's the real power behind the throne.

Like Gordos public announcement 3 years ago that he would free up
councils to spend the money collected selling council house to build more.

That was later scotched by the Treasury.
proving it's the Treasury that tells PMs what they can't do

Steve Terry

On Tue, 7 Jul 2009 09:29:34 +0100, "Ivan"
wrote:

As soon as I was given a 'choice' I left them for United Artists cable back
in the early nineties (which itself has gone through a number of changes and
has now morphed into Virginmedia) and have never regretted it WR to
telephone or broadband.

Do you regret the eye-wateringly expensive call rates that Virgin
charge? Often several times higher than even BT's undiscounted rates?

--

On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:13:58 +0100, Kay Robinson
wrote:


Now there's a book that should be compulsary reading in all schools.
The problem is that with the standard of eduction at present, most
kids wouldn't understand a word of it, it'd be right over their heads.


It should be compulsary. Or even COMPULSORY.
The standard of eduction is certainly poor at the moment. So is
EDUCATION.

How was CAESAR's education?