Unless they’re implemented flawlessly, they’re more opaque than transparent.

Take BTC’s supposedly transparent proxy (cache-1-0.btc.bw) for example.

I must have missed the email that announced this new layer between us and the Internet, so I’m not exactly sure when it was implemented, but I have a gut feeling that it could be as much as a month or so ago. Maybe more, but it’s been about that long that I have been seeing some occasional weirdness on my Internet connections. Of course, I didn’t know the cause of the weirdness until recently, so it’s hard to say in retrospect.

Anyway, once I had identified this new obstacle to a better browsing experience, I set about finding out whether it was really the cause of my sluggish browsing and 503 (gateway timeout) errors. This necessitated establishing a browsing session that did not route through BTC, which is a reasonably painless exercise thanks to Mascom’s 3G network. Sure enough, after going 3G and browsing to the same sites that gave persistent 503’s, those annoyances disappeared.

So it was only a matter of implementing a bypass mechanism for the home and office systems, in order to regain a decent browsing experience.

Next on the list of things to do is to find someone at BTC that knows about this new hurdle and see if they can explain why I was getting the 503’s in the first place. Actually, if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was blocking my ubuntu security updates, I’d probably still be scratching my head over this.

It seems we are experiencing persistent issues this week with BTC’s international connectivity.

I have seen a few letters issued by BTC citing problems with their upstream link to London. Connectivity has been somewhat inconsistent, with degraded levels of service as a result of their re-routing traffic over other available international links.

Luckily this does not affect the availability of our customer’s services to the world, however it does impact on their ability to reach their own services. And our ability to reach ours too.

We apologise on behalf of our supplier, and trust that you bear with us during this slightly annoying time.

Here are the notices I’ve received to date:

• BTC INTERNET CUSTOMER NOTICE 180609
• BTC INTERNET CUSTOMER NOTICE 190609
• BTC INTERNET CUSTOMER NOTICE 250609-1