When you can see the BFCC

[Thumper]

BFCC = bloody foreign call centre.

This is an actual event told to me by my brother about a year or so ago. At the time was was working on a floating oil exploration ship in the Bay of Bengal about a mile from the city of Visakhnapatnam.

For whatever reason he has to phone his bank back in England and it is answered by someone with an Indian accent. My brother asks if he is actually in India and in which city. The man replies that he is in a city you probably never heard of called Visakhnapatnam, The conversation then goes like this; "Are you in a high white office block with large red letters HSBC on the roof?". "yes, I'm in that building, why?" "well if you look out to sea, can you see a ship with an orange strip?". "yes I can see it in the bay" "Well, I am on that ship"

They both agreed how crazy it seems that a phonecall is routed thousands of miles so 2 people only a mile apart can talk.

[Brian Gaff]

Ah yes, common problem. I often wonder when listening to people interviewing on the telly, and there is that longer than natural pause between question and answer even though the guy is only 4 miles down the road, what the heck are we doing here, routing it all around and probably via a satellite when we used to be able to do it over a land line.

Brian

[Caecilius]

Before the BT 21CN days, you could be fairly sure that a phone call or FAX between two British locations wouldn't be routed overseas. Nowadays, everything ends up IP packets and could theoretically go where ever the routing gods decide.

We used to be able to use phone and FAX for certain low-grade classified information in the old days, which was quite handy. But now it's verboten because of the may-be-routed-overseas angle.

[John Williamson]

I suspect such links are often done over satellite because it's easier and probably cheaper for the broadcaster to set up a satellite link than run a microwave or UHF link to the nearest tall roof and use a landline or another radio link to either a landline base or another UHF link from there, especially when the interview is about breaking news, and there's no time to do more than make a phone call to the satellite operator saying, in effect "I would like twenty minutes of bidirectional HD video data usable from 19:00, please". Park the truck, line up the dish, and you've (in theory) got a studio quality link to the action. If there's time to edit before broadcast, then the pauses are easily removed automatically, and you'd never notice.

Audio can be and often is done via 3G data networking using VOIP. Video can also be done via 3G, as was done for the Olympic Torch last year, but it's a much more complex problem.

[The Medway Handyman]

That Shappi Khorsandi made me laugh;

"I'm going on holiday to India next week and I wanted know what the weather was like - so I phoned my bank".

[dennis]

The routers probably aren't a part of the internet. There is no reason to allow the packets to leave the BT private network.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Even if they are, there is sod all reason why a packet originating in britain should ever go abroad if it has a UK destination. ISPs useshortest path routing. Only time I saw it happen was when a digger cut the country in half and sliced a bunch of fibres up the M1. we wre routing london->manchester via Mae East, and Amsterdam and IIRC Norway...

[Thumper]

Yeah, like her stand up routine, and not bad looking either.

>

[tony sayer]

In article , Brian Gaff scribeth thus

Sat links are that bit more portable and reliable and can more of less go anywhere unlike land lines which have to be installed.

And 3G never quite hacks it for audio back to base.. live that is...

[Thumper]

One of her best jokes is:

"Mum made me go to the Brownies because she thought it was an after school club for Asian kids."

Proving she considers herself Asian, therefore her joke about Indian call centres can't be racist like someone suggested.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Cobblers; some of the most racist jokes I've heard come from Africans and Indians/Pakistanis.

[Thumper]

Maybe, but they would be telling racist jokes aimed at a different racial group. A joke told by someone of an ethnicity where the joke somehow involves people of the same ethnicity, just cannot be termed racist. It can be offensive, but not racist.

[Fredxx]

Entirely disagree, and you are a racist to suggest it isn't racism.

[dennis]

But treating different racial groups differently just because of their race is racist. That makes you racist for suggesting they should be treated differently.

[Thumper]

I never suggested for one moment that different racial groups should be treated differently. Was simply explaining what is the criteria of a racist joke. And what isn't.

[dennis]

But you state that you are treating the white person differently to the Asian person. Its racism, you are being racist. You cannot say something is racist if one race says it but is not racist if another race says it. To do so is treating them differently.

[bert]

In message , Thumper writes

It can be considered as racist if anyone who hears it even 2nd hand or reads about it considers it to be offensive according to the complaints made against premiership referee Mark Clatenbourg (?) by the Association of Black Lawyers, maybe itself a racist group because it bars white lawyers

[Fredxx]

The true test of a racist, is when all around you are calling you a racist, and you are still in denial.

[Thumper]

I have not stated anywhere that any race should be treated differently to any other race. Stop making things up. I've seen some of your replies on other threads and know how you twist things and misquote to your own advantage.

[Thumper]

Everyone has probably said something racist at some time, Maybe accidently, maybe in anger. You probably have, I probably have. That doesn't make us racists in the sense of hating everyone that is non-white racism.