Why can’t all parcel deliveries be like this?

Today I received a delivery of a consignment from Amazon. Sounds relatively trivial, right? Why am I blogging about something so commonplace?

Because the parcel not only arrived on the day I expected it, but at the time I expected it.

People often slag off parcel companies, and with good reason. Ask around (or look online) and you hear horror stories of fragile items being thrown over fences or gates, items being left out in the rain, items arriving damaged, or the dreaded outcome of being left a calling card when you had actually stayed in all day to receive the parcel.

Amazon chose to ship via DPD, who I’ve not got much experience with. All I can say having received the delivery is “Please can you use them every time”.

Once they had a waybill open for the package, I got an email and a text message informing me of the consignment number, and giving me the expected delivery date – along with options (via SMS or Online) to rearrange delivery to a neighbour, or a different day, or arrange collection.

The parcel was easy to track on their website, with details of which stage in the process the consignment was.

This morning, I got an email and message when the delivery van left the depot, not only confirming that the package was out for delivery but what time I could expect the delivery – I was given as a one hour window, and again, options to have the item left with a neighbour, delivered on a different day, or be collected.

What a massive help. You could plan your day around when the delivery was expected, and what’s more, they kept to their estimate – arriving about 10-15 minutes into the delivery window.

I’m really impressed that a parcels courier has been able to properly design harness it’s business IT systems, automation and processes to deliver such a great experience. Why can’t more be like this?

The train now standing at platform 2… is going to leave you behind.

We often hear complaints in the media about overcrowding on our railway system here in the UK, normally with reference to peak commutes in and out of our big cities. But this is about a Sunday afternoon…

On the way back from visiting my partner’s family in North London, we changed train at Herne Hill to head home to Bromley.

The train arrived from Victoria, only four coaches long, and looked very busy – lots of people already standing up. As we both had an overnight bag and a couple of other things, we actually ended up split across different coaches in order to board. The train also left two young women behind on the platform, who both had luggage and couldn’t find a doorway that they could get in with their suitcases. The driver closed the doors while they were still looking for space, and set off, leaving them to wait half an hour for the next train.

I doubt the driver deliberately left them, for all he or she knew, the women with the luggage could have just got off the train, but the fact is, it’s going to suck getting left behind and having to wait ages for your next train, especially if you’re coming to the end of a long journey.

But, the driver is under an amount of pressure to depart on time because of the way delays are aggressively accounted for, attributed and traced back to their root cause, on the modern UK rail network. (For those who need some serious bedtime reading, here’s a link to a rather dry 116 page document called the Delay Attribution Guide. It’s purpose being to guide Delay Attributors, yes, there really is such a job, in identifying the source of delays.)

Onboard, the train didn’t have quite as many people as a crush-loaded train typical rush hour, but was just as full in other ways – the space being taken up with pushchairs, bicycles and luggage – people coming back from days out and trips away from home.

The fact is that weekends can now be just as busy as midweek rush-hours, but with a noticeable difference in the type of passenger – not only do they have more and bulkier belongings with them, but they also that some of them don’t make that journey every day. This means they don’t know the drill, and therefore can’t really follow the seemingly unspoken rules of being a commuter that make the system deal with the pressure during the work week.

The design of the train doesn’t particularly help those with prams or bulky luggage either. These surburban trains are designed for their main duty of rush-hour people carriers, and maximise seating and standing areas. They don’t have proper cycle spaces, and only small overhead luggage racks – no good for larger cases, so these tend to block the doorways. Nothing “wrong” per-se given the design decision made, bearing in mind the main purpose of the train, but travel habits have changed since they were designed in the 1990s (e.g. cheap air travel, internet-enabled last minute deals on weekends away, etc.).

Adding to this, engineering work can displace passengers from their normal routes, and events can create spikes in loadings.

The trains on many routes are also more sparse on Sundays, e.g. every 30 minutes instead of every 15, so with rising passenger numbers, and more bulky belongings being carried at the weekends, why are the trains shorter on Sunday than during the week?

If the train operators are running shorter trains “because Sundays are quieter”, this might be a valid statement in terms of total passenger count carried per day, but the passenger count per train can be as high as it is midweek, and if so, can this form a basis to run trains which are the same length as those midweek?

…and you’re not gonna reach my telephone.

Or, when an FTTC install goes bad.

Finally got around to getting FTTC installed to replace my ADSL service which seldom did more than about 3Mb/sec has had it’s fair share of ups and downs in the past. Didn’t want to commit to the 12 month contract term until I knew the owner was willing to extend our lease, but now that’s happened, I ordered the upgrade, sticking with my existing provider, Zen Internet, who I’m actually really happy with (privately held, decent support when you need it, don’t assume you’re a newbie, well run network, etc…).

For the uninitiated, going FTTC requires an engineer to visit your home, and to the cabinet in the street that your line runs through and get busy in a big rats nest of wires. The day of the appointment rolled around, and mid-morning, a van rolls up outside – “Working on behalf of BT Openreach”. “At least they kept the appointment…”, I think to myself

BT doesn’t always send an Openreach employee on these turnups, but they send a third-party contractor, and this was the case for this FTTC turn-up…

Continue reading “…and you’re not gonna reach my telephone.”

First Great Western pledge to cut “tosh” announcements

Hurrah! A victory for common sense and a quiet life on the horizon for First Great Western passengers, as they have promised to review all train announcements and remove as much of the extraneous tosh as possible.

Their research has shown that because so much drivel comes out of the public address systems, the travelling public are conditioning themselves to tune out, because every time the train arrives at a station they are reminded to mind the gap (even when there isn’t much of one), take personal belongings, report anything suspicious, and just in case they’ve forgotten, to remember to breathe.

As for the person (I nearly found myself calling them something far more impolite) from industry watchdog Passenger Focus, who appears to be suggesting that these lengthy hectoring announcements are necessary, I find myself wondering when was the last time he travelled on a train?

Announcements need to be more like tweets… Concise, but able to get all the important information across, and in as few words as possible.

Looking at the “back” of a city

Anyone else notice how a train journey in or out of a city such as London, is a view of the “back” of the city?

The view from the windows is almost always of the “back” of things. Backs of houses, back gardens, faceless backs of warehouses, shops, offices, interspersed with car parks, yards and allotments, with glimpses of the “front” peeking through the gaps.

“This is coach 11 of 8” and other nonsense

Coach number 11 of 8Recently seen on a journey from Victoria – this train was to split en-route at Faversham, with the front 8 coaches going to one place, and the rear 4 going forward to somewhere else.

Thanks to a software bug in the train’s passenger information displays and automated announcements, it gave out confusing information as shown in this picture. The software could understand the train would split, but couldn’t understand it was a 12 coach train at this point.

I’ve written about this sort of automated ridiculousness that we have to put up with before – Torrential Tannoys – all about the endless stream of hectoring announcements a user of public transport has to deal with in the UK.

What’s doubly annoying is that the announcements are frequently verbose and use patronising language, or worse still, use flowery and unclear language, which means they don’t get their message across.

I heard an announcement at Finsbury Park a few weeks ago, advising of upcoming weekend engineering work. The announcement went on for about two minutes, starting with something along the lines of “Can I have your attention please, this is special information for customers who might be travelling this weekend. As we invest in the railway, we will need to make changes to the train services at the weekend”, blah, blah, waffling on about “services will be subject to alteration and road transport might be provided if appropriate”.

Why couldn’t it just say, “Travelling this weekend? There is engineering work, a different timetable will be in operation, some trains will be replaced with buses. Check your train times.”

We also have the situation where the staff on a train will use the PA, and then the automated announcement will repeat, almost word for word, what the human being has just said – reminding us to “watch the gap”, “take personal belongings with us”, “look out it’s raining and you might slip”, and “report anything suspicious to the Perrlice“… Why say something once when you can repeat yourself, eh?

Which brings me onto the terrible pronunciation on these recorded (or synthesised) announcements. If you’ve been through Kings Cross St Pancras tube station, you can’t have failed to notice “Laydees and Gentle Men”, right? Apparently, one of the speech synthesis systems can’t even pronounce “Wrotham” (which is pronounced “Roo-tem”), so the station is now just referred to as “Borough Green” by the automatic system.

The Transport Minister, Norman Baker, has now spoken out in the media against the never ending announcements. I don’t know if it will do any good.

Really, the people responsible for this at the train companies need to actually realise that by bombarding us with automatic announcements, we’re making the actual important stuff less easy to pick out. Announcements need to be clear, concise, correct, and to the point.

UKNOF: Openness and sponsorship

As some readers will know, I’m involved in running UKNOF – a series of regular meetings and a mailing list aimed at the UK Network Operations community. The next meeting is being held in London on 18th April, and we’re hoping it’s going to be one of the best attended UKNOF meetings we’ve had in a while.

The last few meetings in London have been so popular that we’ve outstripped the size of the venue that hosted the meeting, so this time we’ve gone for somewhere bigger still, which should allow us to go up to about 150-200 people. This is really important, as UKNOF is grounded in an ethos of openness, so having to turn people away really goes against the grain for us.

But accommodating every increasing numbers presents a challenge, because, best of all, there’s no charge to attend a UKNOF meeting. It’s paid for through the generosity of sponsors, and supported by individual volunteers from the community who put the meeting together.

For the upcoming UKNOF 25 meeting in April, we’ve already got a generous Platinum event sponsor in the shape of Ericsson, but so we’re able to maintain this momentum in the future, we’re working on building a supporting sponsor community.

There aren’t many conferences in our community which are run this way (free to attend) and open to all interested parties. They tend to be aimed at more specific communities (such as members of a particular IXP) or are invite only (such as the Network Field Day series). UKNOF is differentiated by it’s openness and transparent management.

The sponsorship of an open meeting such as UKNOF benefits the Network Ops industry in the UK by lowering the bar to attend, which has the effect that we get a broad audience from the community.

So, if a sponsor is ever thinking about helping UKNOF, think about how it fits in with your Corporate Social Responsibility goals.

We get people at UKNOF that simply wouldn’t have the budget (or get managerial permission) to attend the typical industry conference, which would have a registration fee in the hundreds of pounds, may need expensive overnight stays in flashy hotels, you get the gist. If a company is going to spend that sort of money on sending someone to an event, they are going to send their top bods, and not necessarily the guy at the coal face.

Yet the target of UKNOF isn’t just the experienced engineer who already knows it, it’s those who haven’t been around as long, those who are in a position to learn from those who’ve been around the block a couple of times – UKNOF’s main raison d’etre is often said to be “distribution of clue” – knowledge sharing and information exchange.

So we’re really glad that we don’t just get the “usual suspects” from the global Internet meeting circuit at UKNOF, but a real cross-section of the UK Net Ops community – we can use UKNOF to bring the best of the content (and well known speakers) from the global circuit to a UK audience that can’t get to the bigger meetings, and cover topics which are closer to home and of specific interest to the local community.

Are venue wifi networks turning the corner?

I’m currently at the APRICOT 2013 conference in Singapore. The conference has over 700 registered attendees, and being Internet geeks (and mostly South-East Asian ones, at that), there are lots of wifi enabled devices here. To cope with the demands, the conference does not use the hotel’s own internet access.

Anyone who’s been involved with Geek industry events knows by painful experience that most venue-provided internet access solutions are totally inadequate. They can’t cope with the density of wifi clients, nor can their gateways/proxy servers/NATs cope with the amount of network state created by the network access demands created by us techies. The network disintegrates into a smouldering heap.

Therefore, the conference installs it’s own network. It brings it’s own internet access bandwidth into the hotel. Usually at least 100Mb/sec, and generally speaking, a lot more, sometimes multiple 1Gbps connections. The conference blankets the ballrooms and various meeting rooms in a super high density of access points. All this takes a lot of time and money.

According to the NOC established for the Conference, most concurrent connections to the network are over 1100, s0 about 1.6 devices per attendee. Sounds about right: everyone seems to have a combination of laptop and phone, or tablet and phone, or laptop and tablet.

One thing which impressed me was how the hotel hosting the conference has worked in harmony with the conference. Previous experience has been that some hotels and venues won’t allow installation of third party networks, and insist the event uses their own in house networks. Or even when the event brings it’s own infrastructure, the deployment isn’t the smoothest.

Sure, we’re in a nice (and not cheap!) hotel, the Shangri-La. It’s very obviously got a recently upgraded in-house wifi system, with a/b/g/n capability, using Ruckus Wireless gear. The wifi in the rooms just works. No constant re-authentication needed from day-to-day. I can wander around the hotel on a VOIP call on my iPhone, and call quality is rock solid. Handoff between the wifi base stations wasn’t noticeable. Even made VOIP calls outside by the pool. Sure, it’s a top-notch five-star hotel, but so many supposedly equivalent hotels don’t offer such a stable and speedy wifi, which makes the Shangri-La stand out in my experience.

There’s even been some anecdotal evidence that performance was better over the hotel network to certain sites, which is almost unheard of!

(This may be something to do with the APRICOT wifi being limited to allow only 24Mb connections on their 802.11-a infrastructure. Not sure why they did that?)

As the Shangri-La places aesthetics very high on the list of priorities, they weren’t at all in favour of the conference’s NOC team running cables all over the place, so their techs were happy to provide them with VLANs on the hotel’s switched infrastructure, as well as access to the structured cabling plant.

This also allowed the APRICOT NOC team to extend the conference LAN onto the hotel’s own wifi system – the conference network ID was visible in the lobby, bar and other communal areas in the hotel without having to install extra (and unsightly) access points into the public areas.

This is one of the few times I’ve seen this done and seen it actually work.

So, in the back of my mind, I’m wondering if we’re actually turning a corner, to reach a point where in-house wifi can be depended on by event managers (and hotel guests!) to such an extent they don’t need to DIY anymore?

A stranger in my own land

We’re looking for a cleaner to come and do a couple of hours a week, just keeping on top of the dust, and doing the things like bathrooms and kitchens which a good cleaner seems to be able to do in less than half the time I’d be able to do it and at least twice as well.

So, when a card came through the door from a local cleaning agency, professing that their cleaners speak fluent English (no jingoistic tone intended, this becomes relevant in the next paragraph), I gave them a call.

The first person I spoke to sounded cheerful enough, and despite obviously having an Eastern European accent, spoke good English. However, it soon became clear from the blank silences that she couldn’t understand me.

Yes. I’m from the North West. Yes, I have an accent. Yes, I can talk in local dialect when I’m with my fellow Northerners. But as far as I can tell, I was speaking my best London-ified Queen’s English. Oops.

So, I was asked to hold, while someone was found who could understand my peculiar accent.

Then got cut off. Then someone else phoned me back. Didn’t speak as clearly as the first person, but could understand me. Then we got cut off again. They called back. Part way through the discussion, we got cut off again. They also kept talking v e r y  s l o w l y to me like I was the one who had a problem understanding.

Left feeling like a stranger in my own land, when they tried phoning back again, I didn’t bother picking up. It all seemed like too much of a faff, and it seems they can’t even employ people in the office that could work a telephone.

Suffice to say, I’ll go and look elsewhere.

On a Swedish plane…

…in Sweden, in a Scandinavian published magazine, a Yorkshire-born Brit writes about British pubs, in American English (you say “crisps”, he writes “chips”, railway/railroad, po-tay-toe/po-tah-toh), and thinks that “Thame Parkway” sounds like an entry in “Jane Austen’s address book”.

I sat in my seat and cringed.

Serves me right for reading an inflight magazine, I guess.