Monday, January 22, 2007

GNN wastes bandwidth

There is, would you believe, one thing that annoys me just slightly more than the Government. Bandwidth wastage. What do I mean by that? I mean people who "reply all" to huge great long email of jokes and append "tee hee" to the top of it and add a ridiculous legal disclaimer at the bottom.

Imagine my horror therefore when the Government engages in bandwidth wastage. Oh how the blood boils. Over the past hour I have received no less than eight emails with the following subject line "Tough new penalties for illegal mobile phone use from 27 February 2007" from GNN.

The content of these emails is identical with the exception of some statistics about the particular region it is in e.g south-west, south-east, London etc. Now, some may say that I chose to subscribe to alert from all the regions so what do I expect?

What I expect is sanity in sending out information. What I don't expect is for largely the same data to be sent over and over again with only minimal difference. New penalties for mobile phone usage in cars are national in significance, so send it out once and put statistics for each region in the one alert.

The scariest thing is that I chose plain text only email which mean they must do the same thing with HTML email too which are even bigger hogs of bandwidth.
Note: In the time it took me to write this a ninth copy arrived.

1 comment:

Jonathan Sheppard said...

Maybe there should be a fixed 60 quid fine and 3 points for Government wasting bandwidth!