 Re: Internet Access
Hey, that's my old industry. Fond memories.
We've seen quite a few situations over the years, including:
1. A house in Italy where we could not get ADSL, tried satellite and did not like it (the latency was too big for web site development), and eventually used land based antennas to beam a neighbor's ADSL (about a mile away) to our house. It was pretty slow and unreliable, but it was a life saver. That has to be my favorite. We set up the antennas, drilled a hole through the wall, used a laser to point the dishes, etc.; it was pretty cool.
2. A house in Italy with no ADSL and no unlimited dial-up. You paid by the minute and we had some huge Internet bills. That and terrible service. Telecom Italia is world famous for being bad, but I wouldn't want the job of repairing all the old and breaking wires in the ground.
3. Our house in Healdsburg was off the ADSL grid (too far from the nearest CO), so we used land based wireless DSL. They beamed it out from the top of the local cinema, and we could just get reception on our roof through a pine tree. Every time the wind blew and the tree swayed, our DSL slowed down (no, really).
4. Here is PB, it's really boring. We get seriously fast 10+mbps cable Internet and it always works. Where the fun in that?
James |