OK, UK has 66 million people, assumed EVERY SINGLE ONE, man, women, child, has a separate broadband link, wow!
Assume every single one wants to switch broadband every single year.
So 66 million broadband switches a year.
- That is 180000 a day
- 7500 an hour
- 2 a second.
So TOTSCO would handle, on that massively exploded logic, 2 a second.
FFS a single Raspberry Pi could do that.
Even "office hours only" pushes to like 6 or 7 a second maybe.
Why is this a whole company, and AWS servers and whatever?
Update: To be clear this is very flippant and verging on a joke. Yes, the load will be very little, and yes, the peak may be more, but not hugely, and yes, you need redundant servers and so on. But the whole thing feels like massive overkill the way it has been done, that is all.
Because, in their infinite wisdom, the nation's regulator decided to impose upon an entire business ecosystem a mandatory new way of working, but simultaneously decided not to bother to provide the tools to actually adopt that new way of working.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely inexcusable.
Imagine if when HMRC went down the electronic VAT filing in the early 00s. This would be a bit like if HMRC had said "you need to build your own VAT portal, between all of you, businesses of the UK!" ... "Come on! Sort it all out, you'll be fined if you don't!"
It should not be OK for a regulator/similar to make a rule that is binding, and requires a technological solution AND THEN NOT MAKE THAT SOLUTION.
Totsco are between a rock and a hard place, frankly. On the other hand, nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to grasp this particular nettle. On reflection, perhaps a better outcome for the entire industry would have been for ***nobody*** to step up. Ofcom would have either had to re-think, or hire consultants to actually build it themselves. And then all the delays would be squarely their fault.
any fule kno, peak usage can be multiple orders of magnitude more than average usage
ReplyDeleteIndeed
DeleteWhile I agree with your general sentiment about OFCOM and TOTSCO, I don't think the "why a whole company" argument holds a lot of water.
ReplyDeleteA "whole company" in the UK can be a single person, and individuals are sometimes advised to set up a limited company purely for tax or legal reasons, even if they plan to continue working as individuals. Likewise, individuals can set up AWS servers (I experimented with one myself as a cloud backup solution).
So being a company doesn't imply anything in particular about expected workloads or necessary resources. It's entirely possible that TOTSCO is run by a couple of people closely associated with OFCOM, and they set up separate company just to have a distinct legal entity with its own accounts (and to protect OFCOM from being sued directly).