Saturday, July 28, 2007

>>The world of tommorrow>>

Four letters for you "A" "D" "S" "L". I finally made the move onto what is tentatively described as broadband. I signed up this morning, and will hopefully be permanently tethered to the net within 5 working days. For now I am sticking with my dial up ISP, and am on a pretty reasonable 20GB download plan. I can't see myself ever downloading 20 GB, but for only $5 extra over 1GB of downloads, it seemed like a good deal. Interestingly after signing up I found that my ISP has a usage meter that I've never seen before. On checking it, it says that I've downloaded 75mb in the last month. I can't see my internet habits changing that much, but I guess it is coming at me a lot faster so who knows?

The speed however is only 256/64 kbps, which is slow by todays standard but beats the pants off my nominally 56K dial up connection. It works out to be something like 40 times faster, assuming that I get the full 256kbps download speed. A friend up the road is on an over 1028kbps plan and only gets about 100, so I hope my phone line is a bit better.

My brother is unlucky as he lives too far from the exchange to get ADSL and ended up getting cable from Bigpond. Sure it's faster, but it's a lot more expensive. I suppose the sweetener to the deal was the bundling of phone and internet, so it's not too bad. It also helped that his house was already wired for cable.

As for a modem, I bought a Netcomm NB5Plus4W wireless modem/router last week. Wireless so I can use it with my laptop and desktop. I am not looking forward to setting it up. I've tried some networking before, and it confuses the crap out of me. Oh well, time will tell.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Internet download expands to meet your limits very quickly. If you have been functioning on dial up, you have my admiration.