Offer Made

Well, the sleepy little taman has been offered internet connection and phone lines. Guess the noise was worth the effort. Not sure how worthwhile,  but I think it will be better than what we have now.  Slow, but consistently slow rather than some connection, some times, for some time, slowly.  Now I had to smile - just as I wrote that last line I was kicked off the connection three times.

We will apparently be blessed with overhead phone lines that carry the internet through those lines as well.  Some time in October.  I am trusting that October means 2012.

If it were not affecting me I could probably have a giggle. These clowns are willing to install as they say, cooper wires, which I think they mean copper, line poles, and of course I would imagine, surveyors in order to line up these poles properly.  That should employ a dozen or so installers for a month or two.  The alternative would be to send out a couple of employees to trench in the fibre optic lines to our homes and be done in an afternoon.  I have seen the speed of this system in Canada. I had a new line brought to my home for fibre optic internet and it took a matter of minutes, well maybe an hour to complete the task.  I am not going to tackle this issue.  I am agog with anticipation of having a phone my friends can call me on, an internet connection 'on demand'.  I am guessing I can have internet wirelessly in my home.  I am afraid to ask.  I have checked and  never seem routers available for sale here, so don't want to even rock that boat right now.

We are not talking high speed. I do not profess to understand connection speeds but I did some little meter test this morning on what I currently have.  At my best with the 'dongle' I can get download speed of 3 Mbps and upload of .4 Mbps.  Not knowing what that means, I only know that it is a far cry from what I am familiar with back home. Home - connection is a blink of an eye. Here, with the numbers I quoted gives me time to fill the kettle, prepare some coffee in the press, open the doors on the main floor and put in a load of laundry before I am given the opportunity of opening a web page.  That all can only happen if the internet actually connects. So, I am guessing that the 1 GB offered to me with this cooper line will be a shock to my computer.  I just googled shaw, a provider of internet back home. Their mid-range package offers 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps (not .5) upload, so I think I will be far behind that one with the new offer. But considering that I am no where close to that now I guess I will feel like I have joined the technical age anyway.