Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 30 July 2004, 5:50 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Tuesday 27/7/2004 Scoop Wearden is at it again, hassling innocent communications companies and demanding information. Today, it's the turn of Updata, a Danish operator whose mission is to supply far-flung local authorities with symmetric broadband. It's a niche, but a good one -- and to provide the service, the company is one of the few to take advantage of the local-loop unbundling rules that let you stick your gear in a BT exchange.
Scoop sniffs a chance. So, he asks, how is BT about that? Doesn't it resent you lot turning up and demanding house room in their nice buildings?
"Oh no! Not at all." says Updata, which goes on to explain that as it's not doing mass consumer stuff BT is more than happy to help out as much as it can. "In fact," said Updata, pulling out a large photograph, "they particularly liked this."
The picture shows an equipment rack with an engineer standing beside it. You can see the cabling, the various bits of kit, and how it all looks when installed in an exchange.
"When we were negotiating with BT's senior management", explains Updata, "we showed them this. "Oh!" said the BT bods. "So that's what it looks like!" Turns out the people running the service had never poked their nose into an exchange to see what it was they were selling".
Meanwhile, back at the office, we were all excited to get an invitation from Freud Communications to a special press screening of "I, Robot". Well, some of us were excited: the science fiction fans made quiet vomiting noises and stuck pins in small dolls of Will Smith. It wasn't until we checked the details of the showing that we found it had been on Monday, and that attending this freebie would require a modicum of time travel. Perhaps they mixed it up with the remake of the Time Machine.
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