At Long Last

Our national nightmare is over. After four months. After watching all of The Sopranos, the first three seasons of Eastbound And Down and Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the first seasons of Space Ghost, Gilligan's Island and Homeland, the first two seasons of Boardwalk Empire, season three of the X-Files and countless movies on DVD ... we have cable! and internet!

Whewww!

It's not completely finished yet, though. What we have now is a temporary line. Because the guy today didn't have the equipment needed to bury the line (or to sneak it under our driveway), the cable is laying on the ground. It runs 200' up to our house, then waaayyyy around the house on the side opposite the driveway, around the back, then up to the cable connections. Whatever. As long as the mice don't nibble through it. Mice? Yes, lots of mice. We built a big house for lots of mice to live under.

10 thoughts on “At Long Last

  1. platosearwax

    That’s a good question, Rob. Since we have folks from all over we should compare. I have 30Mbps down and 5Mbps up, which has been down for about 30 hours total in the last 10 years (almost all of that in one incident occurring on a weekend). Serious stability. I pay the equivalent of $70 a month for that, which based on the cost of living here, is cheap.

    1. platosearwax

      Their website says their service may not be available in my area. You don’t say…

      Just purchased Storefront Hitchcock. Haven’t listened yet but the weekend is coming up.

  2. Rob Caldecott

    I have 50/15. £26 a month. Fibre to the Cabinet. So still copper into the house. And at those speeds it has to be black magic.

    1. cleek

      50/15. £26 a month.

      holy crap.

      it’ll be a lifetime before fiber/re to the house is widespread in the US. there’s just too much distance to cover.

      honestly, though. i don’t see any difference between the 20 and the 10 i used to have – most of the time is spent waiting for remote servers to respond. i’m loving the faster upload speed, however. i was previously capped at 300Kb.

  3. Rob Caldecott

    We stream a lot of TV. I’m into Netflix, my daughter is hooked on the BBC iPlayer and we often stream movies via our internet-enabled set top box. This eats bandwidth. Streaming full HD needs about 7 Mbps. Anything less than 20 would be a problem. I initially had a lower speed when I switched to FTTC but it was capped at 40GB a month and we were blowing that in 10 days! I went up a level as it comes with unlimited use as well as faster speeds. A friend of mine lives closer to the exchange and gets 75 down!

    But you’re right. The UK is tightly packed so rolling out fibre is easier. People in more rural areas are stuck with low speed confections though.

    I’ve just started House of Cards and Breaking Bad and my opinion of Netflix has gone up. HoC is excellent. Kevin Spacey is very watchable.

    Anyway, welcome back.

    1. cleek

      we’ll get to HoC, i’m sure.

      i need to recommend Homeland. i wasn’t expecting to like it. but so far it’s a great cat-n-mouse show.

      American Horror Story is pretty good, too.

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