and the return through Blackrod Station

This photo and these videos have also been added to the railtour section of the Horwich Station website.

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I currently have an iPhone 3G, originally purchased through Carphone Warehouse and on the O2 network, the contract for which expires in less than a month. I haven’t bothered pursuing a new iPhone 4 for a number of reasons, the greatest being that although I could have paid £40 to get out of my existing contract, my shiny new iPhone 4 would have still been on the O2 network for at least another 18 months.

So what’s wrong with O2′s network? Well, two things mainly:

Data Speed

Or more accurately, the lack of it.

I’ve found O2′s 3G coverage to be patchy at best, but really that isn’t the issue here. There’s no point having a 3G connection between your phone and the local base station mast if the connection behind that appears to be running on wet string.

On a DSL/Broadband connection I would expect to see ping times less than 20ms rising to around 100ms on a mobile connection but not 8 seconds! – see speedtest.net screenshot to the right. Note also the measured 0kbps download speed.

Prior to getting an iPhone 3G, I had been with Vodafone and Orange and only switched to O2 in order to get the iPhone. I regularly tethered the phones on Voda/Orange (all GPRS only) to my laptop and never experienced the slow speeds on O2 that are more the norm than the exception.

Now, at a stretch, O2 could be forgiven for being caught out by the huge rise in mobile data that the iPhone and other smart phones have created; that wasn’t yesterday, however, and from my experience O2 do not appear to have invested sufficiently in their network infrastructure to cope with the increased demand, choosing instead to apply data caps. Although, at only 200MB average per month, I would not be affected by the caps, that’s no help if you can’t transfer that data at a usable speed.

Failed Calls/Calls wrongly sent to Voicemail

More worryingly are the problems with good old fashioned voice calls. It is not uncommon to require half a dozen attempts to place a call and incoming calls will often go straight to voicemail despite having a full network signal. Several work colleagues (both iPhone and non-iPhone) confirm similar experiences with calls on O2. Again this suggests that either the local base station or the network is swamped, so despite a full radio signal, there is no slot to make/receive the call.

Given all this, I decided to be patient and switch networks after the contract expired. Note that this is based entirely on mine and my work colleague’s personal experiences, others’ experience may vary.

Early Upgrade offer

All the above is basically background to the following:

This morning I received a call from Carphone Warehouse (020 8617 5910) offering an ‘early upgrade for loyal customers’. Although I had already chosen to wait, I decided to listen to what they had to offer. I happened to mention that whatever I upgraded to, it wouldn’t be on the O2 network.

“Why not?” I was asked.

I explained about the slow data network (we never got around to the issue making/receiving calls).

“Would you be upgrading to the iPhone 4?” (of course I would)

“Well the iPhone 4 has a much faster processor than your 3G so speed won’t be an issue”

What?! Were they seriously suggesting that a faster CPU in the phone could somehow make up for slow connections within O2′s network. This was one new feature Steve Jobs obviously failed to mention. Despite explaining that no matter how fast the CPU speed it could not make up for the slow connection, and that by their argument my WiFi speed would also be slow (it is not), they kept blaming the speed of the CPU in my iPhone 3G. The sales bod even went away and returned to say that her manager said the same thing. I wonder whether they realised that they were effectively saying the iPhone they had supplied was not fit for purpose.

I smelled a rat. Which network I choose is surely my choice. “Why are we even discussing O2′s network?” I asked before deciding to end the call, “Thanks, but I’ll leave it until my contract has expired when I’ll be shopping around”. “OK, I’ll leave it a few weeks before calling again”. Despite that CPW rang me twice again the same day!

Only after the call did I realise what was going on. Although I purchased the phone through Carphone Warehouse, my contract is with O2, not Carphone Warehouse. CPW are therefore not in a position to release me early from my contract, unless of course it was being sanctioned/offered to them by O2. No wonder they were so defensive about O2′s network, the early upgrade offer would no doubt have been dependent on staying with O2.

I will likely be switching to Vodafone or Orange but this phone call is discouraging me from doing it through Carphone Warehouse.

Update 9th August

Yet another call from CPW (unanswered). I made a comment on twitter to which CPW’s twitter account replied. I have sent them a message through their website requesting that the calls cease.

Update 10th August

Despite an email reply assuring me that I had been removed from their marketing lists, I was called again last night at 20:25, not what I would consider a reasonable time of day for a marketing call, and again this afternoon.

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More photos on my Flickr account and also some taken looking down from Blackrod on the Blackrod and Horwich Environmental Action Group site.

More details on the Bolton News Website, who have also published four of my photos.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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To help understand how to format time and date it’s best to understand a little of how Excel stores time and dates. By default on Windows based PCs, dates are stored in Excel sheets as the number of days since 0:00 1st Jan 1900 plus 1. Today (12th July 2010), is therefore stored as 40371. Time is stored as a fraction of a day, so 12:00 midday is stored as 0.5 and midday today would be 40371.5.

Times greater than 24 hours

By default, Excel displays times as hh:mm by taking the fractional part of the number stored. This works fine up to 23h59m59s but as soon as you go over 24 hours, then this method loses the fact that we’ve gone over a day and starts at 0:00 again, not very useful if you’re trying to create a timesheet.

To force Excel to take the digits to the left of the decimal point into consideration and display the real number of hours simply add square brackets to the ‘hh’ part of the format i.e. [hh]:mm

Negative Time

If you’ve ever created a calculation that results in a negative time (perfectly reasonable if you have a sheet which records say time owing) you will have seen the dreaded ########. Excel has two date systems, the older being the 1904 system used on Excel for Mac (Excel first appeared on the Mac before Windows even existed) and the 1900 system described above, which is used for increased compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3. While the 1904 system supports negative dates, the 1900 system does not.

To work with negative time values therefore requires switching to the 1904 system. On Excel 2000 this is found under Tools->Options on the Calculation Tab. Excel 2007 has it under Office Button->Excel Options-> Advanced.

Note that if you have already started your spreadsheet, all of your dates will now be out by 4 years and 1 day, so it is best to switch to the 1904 system before developing the sheet if you expect to require negative date display.

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Lots more photos on my Flickr page.

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You can also see some footage from a previous appearance at Jumbles reservoir on BBC North West here.

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In today’s constantly connected world, we have become accustomed to updating programs on a fairly regular basis. Both minor and major updates are available on-line without resorting to retail boxed discs.

Applications can even check for updates when you launch them and many Mac OS X applications on launch, having determined that an update is available, will offer a dialogue box saying “A newer version is available” and offer to “download, install and relaunch” or “skip” – all very efficient and streamlined.

Today, however, I fired up DVD Profiler on the PC. Before adding a new DVD to the collection, the program will download the latest database, which it did but then complained “This database cannot be read as it is for a later version of DVD Profiler”. So why then did it waste time downloading 18MB of data if it wasn’t going to work? Surely it makes sense to check compatibility first. It did however ask whether I wanted to download the latest version; I said yes, but instead of DVD Profiler updating itself, it fired up my browser and dropped me on their download page to download and manually run the installer myself, which rather than a one-click update was the usual long-winded multiple dialog windows application installation process asking all the same questions the initial installer asked. Surely an update should pick up on the existing installation and work with that. I’m surprised it didn’t make me uninstall the previous version, something demanded of several Windows application upgrades.

The new version, as it happens, runs like a dog, so I may well be switching to Delicious Library on the Mac.

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