In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

As anyone who understand the statistics of voting with a public population, 100% (or even close) is impossible.

Anyone who understands statistics will never use the word "impossible".

Doesn't "never" mean it is impossible that it should happen?

In a no. of local run website campaigns that I have seen, people wishing to see where their exchange is listed in the competition were encouraged to click on a link entitled �Race to Infinity & Beyond� which takes them to http://racetoinfinityandbeyond.veadas.net/league.

So, from what you are saying, this was not the official BT league table as the voting data was also being shown on BT�s website. Alas, I cannot verify this now as the competition is ended but will take your word that it was so.

Needless to say, I think you will acknowledge that some false voting has occurred in this competition which resulted in BT having to cull votes from the totals registered by a no. of exchanges. Now I am not accusing your community of such malpractice and am amazed that you had the resources and time to recover your perfectly valid votes and get people to re-vote in what many would deem to be a very busy time of the year.

Now in case you are wondering, I have nothing to do with Castleton (Gwent) � they are about 100 miles away from me. Nor am I having a gripe. I am just merely trying to establish the facts and whether it has been a fairly run competition.

Happy New Year

I'm thoroughly fed up with BT. I live in an urban area 4km from my local exchange (Margate) and I have to suffer with a connection of less than 2Mbps because they refuse to acknowledge there is a problem with the line. That they seem to be able to invest in tiny village exchanges whilst leaving people in cities and towns on slow connections is unbelievable.

I am from Castleton!

As far as I'm aware, the local 'awareness campaign' amounted to one local councillor promoting the competition in the pubs (can't quite see him fiddling the figures!). Oh, and someone said there was something about it in the local rag. Certainly the competition had no visible local presence until a few posters starting appearing in the days before Christmas - at pretty much the same time that the vote count plummeted from 1,100 to 400!

If someone had been faking hundreds of registrations before the cull (where would they get the information?) I'm pretty sure that a large proportion of the culled submissions would have then been resubmitted (modified as necessary to comply with BT's raised verification thresh-holds). In fact, after the cull just a few dozen votes were added before the competition closed.

I'm comfortable that the 1,100 votes was a massively over-stated position, that no misguided individuals had input them and that the dramatically-reduced 450-ish total is about right.

So where did the extra 700 votes come from?!

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

I'm thoroughly fed up with BT. I live in an urban area 4km from my local exchange (Margate) and I have to suffer with a connection of less than 2Mbps because they refuse to acknowledge there is a problem with the line. That they seem to be able to invest in tiny village exchanges whilst leaving people in cities and towns on slow connections is unbelievable.

This is a different subject really, but that speed does sound like a line problem not a distance one. If you can find your line stats and post them, see here for help, (preferably register and start a new thread with them), then we can see what your line attenuation is. That's what determines the feasible speed and we can compare it with the actual.

If the speed is low we can see if there is anything to be done.

So I think you will agree better in a new thread . Helping you is nothing at all to do with tye race to Infinity.

I suspect the rogue votes were something no more sophisticated than someone with a phone book given this lists the number + post code. I read on another site that checks were made to see if large number of votes came from single IP addresses, which were then checked in case they were genuine as some people were legitimately inputing votss for those without internet access.

The comments regardoing Castleton seem to suggest that the vote validation process was rather more efficient than some are giving it credit for being.

I know the feeling.

Its about PR and perhaps even some political reasons for this.

2% of a 30k exchange still amounts to 300 users, anyone designing this demand league would have been well aware the likely winners were going to be small community exchanges.

I expect you have business's using lucrative leased lines in your area.

In reply to a post by New_Londoner:

The comments regardoing Castleton seem to suggest that the vote validation process was rather more efficient than some are giving it credit for being.

...it may or may not have been efficient - there were no published Rules and Regs (a bizarre oversight) so there shouldn't have been a vote validation process - beyond any real-time checks as the vote was being cast - at all!

there were no published Rules and Regs

I seem to remember a few, such as needing to reach over 75% threshold, having more than 1000 lines, one vote per household etc?