Broadband nightmare – again!
It’s a never ending story, the saga of our broadband connection. A ‘reconfiguration’ last week has left us crawling along at around 4KB/s (32Kb/s) – equivalent to slow analogue dial-up.
Living a long way from anywhere has some fabulous advantages, but one of them is not connectivity. We knew this when we moved here, but we did dream of a time when even this remote spot would be connected electronically to the rest of the world by something more than the string and chewing gum that was Telecom Eireann’s rural network circa 2000.
Technology moves on at such high speed that it wasn’t long before we could realistically expect some kind of reasonable service and, following a bit of a local campaign (I won’t bore you with the details, well maybe another time) we managed to get a ‘village’ wireless scheme with a satellite link to the internet.
It’s been a long and frustrating story, and it goes on. Last Thursday some people from Digiweb, the ISP, arrived. They needed to point our satellite dish at a different satellite so they removed the dish from its concrete plinth and bolted it back in a different position. Then they couldn’t find the satellite. So ended Thursday.
On Friday they came back and, after several hours, managed to establish a connection. It was very slow, but we’ve found that’s often the case after it’s been messed with and it usually speeds up after a couple of hours.
Not on this occasion. Between Friday and the time of writing my speed tests have ranged from a low of 2KB/s to a blistering 7.5KB/s (we should be seeing between 64KB/s and 256KB/s). The support people at Digiweb are very nice and are working as hard as they can, which is nice. But we’re still in some kind of techno-limbo.
Rumour has it that 3 Ireland have cellphone coverage here now, though it’s not indicated on their coverage maps. If Digiweb don’t sort us out soon I may have to buy one of 3’s data modems and see if we can share the connection on our network.
