Bit late with this one but itâs funny so worth sharingâŚ
******* brilliant Gareth. Though you might have had to be around in IT in the days of old low baud-rate dial-up âtelephone padâ modems to recognise the dial-up sounds.
BTW why does the âIT MP Supportâ person look like @Badger?
I remember those dial up sounds and the expense. When we used to come here on our frequent holidays my dial up was to Lyon from the Dordogne. 
Iâll see your Lyon and raise you a Miami. 
When my brother first moved to Turks & Caicos in the mid 90s there was no local internet service - the only option was AOL, which involved an international dial-up call to Miami!
Needless to say, internet sessions were limited to âhop online, grab the emails, hop off againâ !
Iâll raise you Hong Kong 
. When I designed modems we had to test them under extreme conditions. We had equipment that could simulate long copper lines, multiple satellite or fibre optic cable hops and many other things but thereâs nothing like real world testing. Rockwell/Connexant whoâs modem chips we used had modem banks around the world with BBSs attached. We used these in France (Sophia Antipolis), the U.S. (Texas, California and Washington) and Hong Kong. Needless to say, our phone bill was quite large 
Thatâs cheating. 
When I first made it online and for some time to come, it was Compuserve that did it. I believe they were later merged into AOL.
Yes I had Compuserve for a while, some time in the late 14th century I think, just after vellum stopped being the thing to use for messages.
Is that âjob droppingâ?
Quite - real lines are usually much worse.
I attempted to get ADSL as soon as it was available but my > 60dB attenuation line was not deemed anywhere near good enough for even the initial 512Kbps service - in fact it took several revisions of the offering before I could finally get a line, which then gave me a massive 1.5Mbps of âalways onâ Internet. A great improvement on the 64Kbps ISDN line I had prior to that.
With some very careful tweaking of the modem I eked out 3Mbps and remained very jealous of anyone on an âup to 24Mbpsâ line that actually got 24Mbps.
I used to work in a UK mobile network and unfortunately we were encouraged to test new sample phones continually from our suppliers
Typically far ahead of us selling the phone.
The network provided SIMs for this which were never billed no matter which countries we called. We rapidly learned which manufacturers produced beautiful phones that broke down.relatively early, which were solid and which phones were frustratingly poor to interact with. When they broke we just got another one out of the cupboard.
Happy days.
More of smarmy Farage and loony Widdecombe!
At Apple, part of the deal with operators all over the globe was that they each had to supply 10 fully featured SIMs for testing and Apple wouldnât be billed for their usage during handset/feature testing.
Of course, there were a few instances where some of these SIMs ended up in automated testing fixtures with roaming enabled and Apple had to make amends with a swift repayment or sending the angry operator a couple of shiny iMacs to say sorry.
Then there was the engineer from a chipset vendor test team that Apple had loaned a couple SIMs to that used them to make long phone calls to friends and family back in India of the weekend.
Fired and taken to court for the cost of the calls by his former employer. I suspect he made the mobile telecom industryâs blacklist as I never heard of him again and itâs a very small world.
Not that I doubt the veracity of your tales but it was very petty of the mobile operators.
The actual marginal cost of moving data around the mobile network is tiny and SIMs for development should just be a sunk cost, no matter how many minutes/GB is racked up.
The mobile industry could be cheap and petty though. But I take your point and suspect if an employee was got rid of, the employer may well have been targeted for some other reason and the employer found an excuse
I wish all the techno babble was in the technology section where it belongs 