Recent threads have included discussions about NHSnet and failed
communications. Till recently I had had very few failures, other than due
to poorly tryped adddressses . This week I had a message that took six
days to be delivered. It was a message forwarded from home to work, one of
Ahmed's little gems to refer to later. The SMTP mailer told me about the
problem and said it would continue to try to deliver for the next week,
which it did.
The distance between home and work is 2.5 miles, or 4km. This means that
the message travelled about 28 metres per hour, or slower than printing it
out and sticking it on the back of a tortoise. "Aha", the pundits say,
"just another example of how poor the SMTP system is!" But wait, the
NHSnet would have stopped trying after just 24hrs, and the message would
never have got there at all.
And when talking about failures sending messages between NHSnet and
Internet and vice versa, don't forget that we are still getting failures
within the x400 NHSnet (for no good reason).
Why are we still being pressurised to join a network with such poor
performance and functionality, run by people without any wish to deliver
what "the users" want? By the way, did anyone notice that BT have stopped
providing the NHS with web services because of poor take-up of their
(overpriced) service? Thought not - but could the same commercial
pressures force changes in NHSnet do you think?
Bill Beeby
GP - Middlesbrough UK
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