When I called Orange they, as expected, put me through to retentions who then rather surprised me by saying that there was no problem adding data to my OVP Virgin tariff and that I could have 500Mb for £5 a month. That wasn’t quite as good as the other tariffs I had been looking at — it was the same price but less data — but I decided to give it a go anyway so he added it to my account.

As my understanding (from searching the internet) was that Orange had two separate classes of SIM only one of which allowed 3G data I explicitly asked if I would need a new SIM but the adviser assured that my current SIM would work fine so off I went to try it out.

Unfortunately, and as you’ve probably guessed by now, it didn’t actually work — in fact data didn’t work at all! So a few days later I found myself speaking to them again. This time I got a very helpful lady who immediately realised that the previous adviser hadn’t set things up right and she proceeded to send about six SIM updates to my phone and then wait while I rebooted it and confirmed that data now worked although I was only getting GPRS and not 3G data.

Once again I asked whether I needed a new SIM and was assured that I didn’t, and it must just be the coverage where I was that was stopping me getting a 3G signal so off I went again.

Fast forward two weeks and I still haven’t seen a 3G indicator once despite visiting a number of different locations so it is obvious that there is still a problem and I ring them again.

This time I get a slightly less helpful fellow who, after failing to find my phone on their database, says that they “don’t support it” and he can’t really help. When pressed that it’s not really about the phone as I know the 3G in it works fine on other networks and I just need my account enabling for 3G he finally admits that I probably do actually need a new SIM to make it work.

Of course it’s not that simple — they can’t just send me a new SIM unless my current one is broken. Even then they would only send me a 3G one if I had a 3G phone. I do, of course, have a 3G phone but what he really meant was “a 3G phone that you bought from Orange”.

So I went for the nuclear option and informed him that in that case I’d like to close my account and get a PAC to move my number to  a more helpful network. At that point he put me on hold and I started waiting…

Something like seven minutes of hold music later he finally came back — by this time I was sure that he was going to say that actually, after speaking to his colleagues, maybe they could send me a new SIM card. Unfortunately it was not to be and he just put me through to disconnections who, possibly for the first time ever, issued me a PAC without making any attempt at all to persuade me to stay.

So when my PAC arrives in a few days (for some reason they insist on sending it by post) it will be goodbye to Orange and hello to Three.

Somehow I don't think that's what they meant to say...

I wonder how many of those they’ve just sent out…

The OVP Virgin tariff has long since stopped being available to new customers, but existing customers have been allowed to keep it. Equally Virgin themselves have stopped offering the post pay option on their PAYG tariffs, except for users who have a SIM on their original PAYG tariff. As it happens I have one of those as well…

The net effect of this is that my average bill over ten years has been about £1.25 a month which means that even after buying two phones outright during that period I have come out much better than I would have done by being on contract with a subsidised phone.

I have recently upgraded to a 3G phone however, which meant I needed to find a new tariff as Orange apparently refuse to enable 3G data for OVP Virgin customers, presumably because they would quite like to get rid of them.

My original plan was to use my Virgin SIM and switch it to post pay mode to get full roaming. That would also give me data access, either at 30p a day (with a 25Mb fair usage limit) or £5 a month (with a 1Gb fair usage limit) which means that if you use it more than about every other day then you want to be on the monthly option.

This week however I discovered that 3 have introduced a SIM Zero tariff which operates in much the same way as the original Virgin tariff and the OVP Virgin clone of that tariff. It also allows 3G data, either at 30p a Mb (quite expensive!) or at £5 a month for up to 2Gb. The call costs are also in general slightly lower than the original Virgin tariff.

The SIM Zero tariff is fairly well hidden however – you won’t find any mention of it on the main 3 web site for a start. After some googling I eventually found this link to the 3 store:

http://threestore.three.co.uk/sim/?id=1183

Even the front page of the 3 store doesn’t seem to provide any direct route to that page — the best it provides is a link to this page for SIM only deals:

http://threestore.three.co.uk/simonly.aspx

Which doesn’t list SIM Zero, although it does list SIM Only Internet which is effectively SIM Zero with the £5 a month internet add-on.

So yesterday I ordered a SIM Zero, which really did go through the checkout as zero pounds and zero pence, not even any postage. Today it arrived — they even threw in a PAYG SIM as well just in case I wanted one.

Now all I have to do is get Orange Retentions to give me a PAC which could be quite fun…

ITO World have now made use of that data to do a comparison with OpenStreetMap and produce a set of tiles which can be overlaid on OpenStreetMap to highlight roads in OS Locator which do not appear to be in OpenStreetMap — that doesn’t always mean the road is missing, or even missing a name — sometimes it just means we don’t agree on what the name is!

A case in point is a road near me called Oxenden Drive. At least that is what OpenStreetMap thinks it is called — the OS Locator data calls it Oxendon Drive instead as shown in this show of OpenStreetMap with the ITO World overlay:

Oxenden or Oxdendon?

So today I paid a visit to recheck the name on the signs and sure enough, the signs agree with OpenStreetMap and say Oxenden Drive.

The Hertfordshire County Council Gazetteer seems to agree with Ordnance Survey (Oxendon) while Royal Mail’s address database comes down on the side of Oxenden.

At the end of all that I’ve decided to leave it as it is, as Oxenden Drive, but who knows what the real answer is…

The situation is that a year ago I changed my package and the new package includes a discount of £2.99 a month if you agree to be bound by a rolling one year contract. To date everything has been fine and they have deducted the discount from each quarterly bill.

In April they wrote to say that the first year was nearly up and that if I didn’t contact them they would assume I wanted to continue for a further year.  I was happy to continue so did nothing.

I was slightly surprised therefore when the latest bill showed no discount beyond 21st May when the first year ended. So I contacted them to ask what going on, and this is what I was told in response.

I can confirm that the reason the discount has not been applied to your recent bill is because BT wanted to make sure that you where happy to keep the service, therefore this will all be rectified on your next bill in August 19th 2010 and on this bill you will be able to see the adjustments, which will cover the billing period for the 20th May 2010 also.

So basically they are saying that they’re going to take bill me the full price now then refund me on the next bill – essentially they want to borrow £8.97 from me for the next three months so they can earn the interest on it instead of me.

The bit about wanting to make sure I was happy to continue is, of course, complete nonsense. As soon as I allowed it roll over into the second year I was contractually bound to continue with it for that year and I’m sure they would have been very quick to bill me for the rest of the year if I had tried to cancel.

I guess maybe I should consider what interest rate I should apply to my loan to them…

Well I’m delighted to say that today a representative of the publishers posted a comment on that piece apologising and explaining what they’re doing to correct things and to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.

So I think that’s a belated “Well Done” to New Holland Publishers.

Possibly not the impression BT would want to give

Yes, that’s right, the first discussion listed is titled “Am I really Unlucky or is BT Customer Services really this abysmal?”. From my experience I’d say the answer is yes, it really is that abysmal…

Today the Open Rights Group has an article about electronic medical records which, talking about the well known case when Gordon Brown’s medical record was accessed improperly, notes an interesting feature of the Scottish system:

Bizarrely enough, I’m slightly reassured by this story: we know about incidents in Scotland only because their Emergency Care Record system is set up to notify patients when their record has been accessed.

Of course it then goes on to say how poorly the English system compares:

In England, you have no idea if your Summary Care Record (SCR) has been accessed or not.

So it turns out that not only can my idea work in theory – it’s actually been tried and has worked in practice.

As a result of a recent data checking exercise that we have carried out, we have discovered that there was an occasion during the year 2007/08 when we did not respond to an email that you had sent to us. We are really sorry about this.

Under the terms of our Customer Guarantee Scheme, you are entitled to a payment of £30.00 plus an additional goodwill gesture of £10.00 for not making the payment at the time. If you are a Thames Water customer, the payment will be made as a credit to your water services account. If you are not billed for water and wastewater services by us, then we will make the payment by way of a cheque.

Needless to say I was more than a little astonished. I think I have now managed to work out which email they are referring to…

The Isle of Dogs from The London Cycling Guide

By way of comparison, here’s how the same area looks in OpenStreetMap at the moment:

The Isle of Dogs from OpenStreetMap

Obviously the maps in the book have had extra information added, and some things like stations changed a little, but the base map is clearly both OpenStreetMap data and OpenStreetMap cartography.

Naturally enough the first thing I did was to turn to the acknowledgements to see what nice things they would have to say about the project, and indeed we do get a mention, though more in passing than anything. What it says is:

All other maps by Steve Dew using base maps by Openstreetmap

More alarming however was what I found at the front of the book, among all the other copyright statements, where it has the following line:

Copyright © 2010 in maps New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd

Whilst it is probably true that there is some copyright (in the additional work done on top of the base map) which vests with them, there is also clearly a substantial amount of work whose copyright lies with members of the OpenStreetMap project.

As far as I can tell nowhere does it indicate that the maps carry a CC-BY-SA license, which they must do, by virtue of being derived from OpenStreetMap maps which carry that license.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that people are using our work (and my own work even – some of the area shown above was surveyed by me) in this way – that’s the whole point after all. I just wish they would spend five minutes to properly credit us and to point people at the license, both of which the license actually requires them to do.

For the record, the first map in this post is © OpenStreetMap and contributors and New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd and the second is © OpenStreetMap and contributors. Both are licensed under CC-BY-SA.

]]> http://compton.nu/2010/05/how-not-to-credit-openstreetmap/feed/ 6