Remembering dial-up

Remember the screech of a dial-up connection? It’s gotta be years since I heard it, until tonight that is. Out of sheer desperation to get back on the net from my home computer, I’ve resorted to the old faithful modem. And man, I’d forgotten how s-l-o-w dial-up is.

You see, the Jones family moved house last Monday  (hence my absence here and elsewhere for a little while) and we’ve still got just a few of the 80 boxes left to unpack. The move itself actually went really well (get this.. a whole bunch of our new neighbours actually had a welcome BBQ for us the day before we moved in…when does that ever happen?!?!? And they’re great people too…).

And I even thought I’d outsmarted the system by getting my hands on an Unwired “rabbit modem” for wireless broadband. But no, we live in a valley and despite the promise of being in the green zone on Unwired’s online map, we’re out of reach. Our next choice is an ADSL2+ service from iiNet. But that’s gonna take between TEN and FIFTEEN days to get up and running. Is that normal? As a guy who’s running a business from a snazzy new home office I can tell you it doesn’t feel normal. Part of the trouble it seems is getting Telstra to play nice (Telstra was the only carrier than can string a regular phone line down our 140 metre driveway.. go figure). Oh, and while I’m on a roll, how can it be that Telstra was going to charge us around $120 for their ADSL service, while iiNet’s faster ADSL2+ comes in at around $60 per month?

Mind you, if a long wait for ADSL2+ is my main complaint from a house move then life can’t be too bad.