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Ben's Talk3G Blog

The 44,472 Mile Tweet

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by
Ben
, 18th August 2010 at 10:17 AM (7239 Views)
In as little as 10 days my tweets could be travelling 44,472 miles in order to reach you.

Ding ding ding! You're absolutely right! For the first time in 6 years I'm going to be back on satellite bloody broadband!

Lets look at the options:
- ADSL: 256k. Technically it's more like 200k down and 300k up, a bit of a puzzle! There are days when I think I could live with it and hope that something better comes along. Then it goes down for several hours. Oh, and the other day it took about an hour to update the Airport Extreme firmware!
- Mobile: Only Vodafone have coverage here, and it's GPRS. Oh, and it's only 1 bar. (Thankfully Sure Signal works on the ADSL, but only if nothing else touches the connection).
- WiMAX: Yes, I'm in WiMAX coverage! Fantastic! Unfortunately the trees are so high and dense, and the lay of the land is just so, that the signal can't be received here. I'd imagine similar issues are to blame for the mobile coverage being so dire.

That leaves satellite. While I can get 5mbps down and 1mbps up, the ~1 second latency is always a killer. Plus there will be fair usage restrictions and a pretty hefty contention in order to give an acceptable price. It'll leave a lot to be desired, but if I ever want to, you know, download something (which isn't unheard of in these days of the Internet), it's the only option.

All this in a place just 5 minutes by car from the centre of Canterbury. Oh how badly our creaking infrastructure sucks.
Categories
WiMAX , Mobile Networks , Computing , Computing

    Comments

    1. Ben's Avatar
        Well that's it, order placed for the Avanti service. Supposedly there'll be improvements in the coming months as clients are migrated to their brand new satellite at no charge, but even so it'd be foolish of me to expect miracles.

        I may hook the Sure Signal up to it once it's installed in a couple of weeks. That should be good for a laugh. Maybe I'll call Customer Services at a few of my favourite mobile networks and see how they like speaking to someone who sounds like they're thousands of miles away.