“The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.” – Robertson Davies, “A Voice from the Attic”, 1960
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Cabin Trip 2014 - Day Three - Internet
It is Wednesday. Sort of day 3. Day 2-1/2 really.
Anyway, I did not finish describing what happened yesterday.
To the most observant of you, you will have noticed that we are blogging. That means we have Internet access. Those of you who have kept up with our annual trips in the past know that it often takes a day or two to get Internet access. Last year on one of my long phone calls to technical support, the agent suggested that I upgrade to their "Gen 4" system...that the upgrade was free.
So, I did. I arranged to get an upgrade of our hardware. And, made the appointment for Tuesday morning after our arrival. And, sure enough, just before noon yesterday a guy and his helper (wife) showed up to do the upgrade installation. It went relatively well. It was a bit tough to position the satellite dish so that it can just see past the stone chimney and get line-of-sight to the satellite. It took a couple of hours, but now we have a fresh, new satellite Internet connection.
The upload speed is somewhat faster. The download speed is much faster. And, our bandwidth allowance increased by a factor of 20! We used to get 250MB per day of download bandwidth. If we exceeded that then we could not do anything for 24 hours. Well, we could buy a "token" that removed the restriction immediately, but those were $5 each (or something like that.) Now, we get 2GB of download bandwidth and at certain hours (2:00 am to 8:00 am) we get an additional 2GB that does not count toward our "normal" allotment. This is a good time to run program updates, download movies or music, etc. The new service is really tuned to today's Internet-based entertainment industry.
It works great.
It is why I am able to tell you about it.
Posted under: Cabin News • Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 09/17/2014 at 03:39 PM
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