Saturday 1 October 2016

Joining the information super-highway

We live in a village, only four miles north of Dover, and yet sometimes it feels like a million miles.

None more obvious than with our internet connection. Back at Crabble, we had Virgin broadband, huge bandwidth, able to watch the i player or whatever we wanted. We thought that is what the internet what, forgetting that elsewhere out of the reach of the cables, things wouldn't be quite so speedy.

Once we moved here, I remember Jools tried to watch an episode of Ugly Betty, but it would not even begin to play. We did not have the bandwidth.

And so we learned to live with it, not always be happy with it. Sometimes the bandwidth is so narrow we can't even stream radio in the evenings when BT ration the bandwidth. When I had my old laptop, we used to wonder what was causing the buffering, its lack of memory or the connection.

We have been promised fibre for some time now, and apparently it was installed in the spring. So we wondered whether it would make much difference. We left it until we came back from Japan, looked into it, and did nothing.

And then last month the bandwidth seemed to get even narrower, and almost nothing seemed to work online. So, we took the plunge, we had to change the phone line supplier to Sky, as fibre only comes in an all in bundle. So, first was to change the landline provider, and when that was done, we could schedule the fibre.

As we waited for the big switch on day, I checked the speeds on the line, and it never got above 0.6 mbs. That Sky were talking about 38 to 42 mbs, but usually 32 would be the norm, these seemed like made up figures. I mean that would open our world to Netflix and using the features on the smart TV.

speed freak THursday was the big day, and I was away, but the engineer sent me texts through the day as he did the work, and once Jools came home she checked the line speed: 38.94 mbs.

As is the usual way. we really have not made the most of the connection yet, other than the speedy uploads of shots to Flickr, maybe we shall watch a film this evening. Or not.

1 comment:

nztony said...

I've been trying to upgrade to UFB since April. The tech came around, made me sign things directly on to his tablet and promised to come back 10 days later to install, just needed the local council to trim a couple of branches first on the pole they were going to string the connection across to my house from. Six months later and still nothing and as for trying to get an update! At least I can Netflix etc in the interim, so it isn't too bad.