Tuesday 29th January 2007
This blog site needs your help.
Here’s where we are at the moment.
We use T-Mobile’s USB Modem (Huawei E220) to access the internet from a Toshiba laptop, not a new laptop and not an old one.
Since Christmas we’ve had problems accessing this blog and every other blog hosted by Blog.Co.Uk. On average we find this host and all its constituent parts off-air, on a ratio of 2 hours on to 7 hours off between 9am and 6pm.
Strange though this is it gets stranger because every other blog site that we know (private site, Blogspot, Bloglines, etc.,) hasn’t been off-air with this problem, in fact we check other sites every time we check ours. Is this making sense?
Having reported the problem to T-Mobile and chased them for answers (they don’t always remember to call back when they say they will) they tell us that they have checked at their end and have no problems accessing blog.co.uk through their USB modem.
Well of course they don’t have trouble if they happen to try it during the times it is on-air.
Now they want me to test my modem on someone else’s computer (yeah, like that’s going to be easy isn’t it?) and/or get others to report this same problem IF there is anyone else having this problem.
This is where we need help.
If you use a T-Mobile USB modem to access the internet and have had problems accessing this blog or any other blog hosted by http://www.blog.co.uk then would you kindly report it to T-Mobile.
T-Mobile can be reached on “150” if calling on T-Mobile’s phone service (free) and 08454 122993 from any other ‘phone.
We had no success getting a reply from their technical Dept through email (datacard.feedback@t-mobile.co.uk) which is the email address volunteered on their website so we can’t recommend reporting by email. However, they are quick to pick up the phone.
If you don’t feel you can make a call to T-Mobile then please bombard me with comments telling me how it is for you. This does rather suppose you have the time to try this blog site throughout the day and I can assure you this isn’t a crafty way of raising our reader ratings.
Thanks for any help you can give, it could be the difference between continuing or closing down Balmaha’s blog as we know it.
Mo
PS. If anyone has a sneaky suspicion they know what’s happening to cause this problem, please vent thoughts, we are stumped and so are T-Mobile.
For those of a technical bent, we can “ping” www.blog.co.uk successfully during times the site is off-air to a T-Mobile USB modem. Off-air means we can’t access the site using IE6, Firefox and Netscape. Please also note that the site is also accessible (during off-air times) through mobile phones (Internet Explorer) using O2, Orange and Vodafone.
Further thoughts – maybe Blog.co.uk’s server is too heavily used, maybe it rejects calls through T-Mobile at busy times rather than “holding” users while time is allocated to a response. Maybe the UK server is in Berlin, Germany (no kidding) and is the same server for sister sites blog.de, blog.fr, blog.ca, etc., and somehow this messes up communications with T-Mobile.
