high-speed internet

[solipsistnation]

You know, the last time I had to shop for my own high-speed internet, it was cable modem, it was all we could get where we lived, and it was pretty slow. Before that, we were paying around $99/month for, I think, 490k SDSL (yeah, that's a weird speed, and the place we lived was far enough from the CO that they couldn't really sell us ADSL for some reason). It could just about support a single 128k mp3 stream as long as you weren't doing much else at the same time. It also took something like 2 months to get it actually set up and working.

I just signed up for a 6.0M/768k link for 35 bucks a month, plus email and all that kind of junk I'm unlikely to ever actually use. And instead of having to schedule weeks or months in advance, they say the line will be turned up on Friday-- 4 days' notice!

Oh, the future. Goodness.

I wonder how oversold our piece of the infrastructure is... And what kind of throughput we'll actually see in practice. Our UCSC on-campus cable modem is okay, aside from the part where at 6:30 or 7:00 at night all of sudden it starts getting really slow as everyone gets out of class and starts doing stuff.

I just barely managed not to pull the whole DSW "You KNOW, I've been doing internet stuff longer than you, NOOB, and I don't want to buy your damn cheapass Motorola *cough*modem*cough* and who cares what OS is running on the machine I'll be plugging into it? Just drop the damn pair and stand back." It took some effort.

Comments

[dasubergeek.livejournal.com]

I had one of those moments. I had an 18-year-old tech trying to tell me that the problem with my dead, unpingable modem was the fact that I had a router on the line.

"You do know I've been doing networking longer than you've been alive, right?"

[awfief.livejournal.com]

It's much better when you're a woman and they talk down to you, and then you spout out knowledgeable stuff,

Of course that's when they don't understand the gibberish you're talking and just repeat their script, slightly slower and louder.as if YOU are the idiot.