Well, maybe I'm finally ready to start with my eccentric musings again after a long old break. Did you miss me dear reader(s)? Well, I moved house just before Xmas and of course, being a man-bloke, my priorities were clear: LCD telly, Internet, food, beer ... then everything else.So, all the other stuff got sorted nicely. Then came the internet. Now my need for the internet is similar to most people's need for oxygen, Kerry Katona's need for Iceland ads or George Bush's need for an 'I used to be the president' bumper sticker. So imagine my joy when my 'super-fast broadband' kit arrived from BT. Where I lived previously, I'd enjoyed mega-fast 10mb speed with Virgin via a nice little cable buried beneath the pansies in the garden. Now I wasn't expecting anything as speedy as that, using ye olde copper phone lines. However, I was expecting, er, a connection.
I set up the whole thing and fired up my browser (Firefox in case you care) and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited.
The page loaded!
Then the internet died.
I re-installed everything, re-set the wireless modem and tried again.
It couldn't find the network I'd just created. Bugger.
I re-installed everything, re-set the wireless modem and tried again. Again.
It didn't like the password I entered. This is the password it gave me to enter. The one in writing on a card that told me to use the password when prompted. No luck.
Then one day I struck lucky and the whole setup sort of shuffled, like an ancient Tibetan monk climbing a hill, to some sort of working state. I decided to run an online speed test to see how fast my broadband really was. Now this may be rather boring and tedious dear reader, but the following bit is actually quite impressive reading.
When I had my Virgin broadband, my average Internet speed was 9.8mb. That's 9,800kb (or kilobits) line speed. When I tested my BT broadband I got .................. 9kb. Yes, that's 9. To put that in some persepective, the age-old ;dial-up' way of connecting to the Internet, that no sane human uses anymore, had a line speed of 56kb. My 'broadband' was over 5 times slower than dial-up. I cried tears of techno-woe.
Over several days, I did many things including connecting the modem directly to my Mac with an (if you care ... ethernet) cable. That is, the modem was connected - by a wire, physically - to my computer. Couldn't see it. What? That's like punching someone in the face and them not being aware of the massive physical impact you've just made on their cranium. I was a little hacked off by now as you can possibly sense.
So I rang the little man at BT - in Lahore, which it appears, is my local point of contact for the East Midlands of England. Anyway, he was a marvel and despite my deeply non-festive mumblings about 'narrowband' and 'worse than dial-up' he did me proud and sorted the problem. It was all to do with the 'channel' on which my modem was set or something. Anyway, the result is that I now average 3mb-4.5mb line speed which is wholly marvellous and sufficient for my needs. So I'm a happy, web-connected bunny at last.
And I can receive all that lovely spam again too....
