This morning at 10am:

It’s the 550+ cut in msecs of latancy that is of special interest.

I feel as if I could cry.

If I had to rate my two most important personal needs, I would choose the following:

1) Broadband internet:  This is both for my work and play.  My job requires constant data transfer(hosting & design).  My play centers around it as well(Q3 servers, etc).

2) A garage: If I’m at home and I’m not playing, then I’m either working on the house or I’m working on a car.  It’s the other two things I do when I’m at home, excluding sleep and bathroom breaks.  If you’ve looked in my gallery, then you have an idea of the type of work I’m talking about.

So there you go.  Broadband internet and a workspace.

Five years ago, I chose to buy a house in the woods that had no garage or broadband internet access.

I liked the “architecture” of the house.  I don’t regret the purchase of the house because I can’t.  If I do, then I have to admit that I’m working on a house that I wish I didn’t buy.  That’s a slippery slope.  Instead, I will say that I wish it had come with a garage and access to internet.

Well, I can’t afford a garage right now, so there’s no use in dwelling on that.  Let’s talk about internet access.

For a couple years, we ran our business on a dial-up connection.  Four computers shared one dial-up connection.  Page loads were sometimes so slow that you could plan day trips around them.  My brother had satellite internet, but I had constantly read bad things about the service and to be honest, products that don’t subscribe to the basic laws of economics scare me.  In spite of my misgivings, I subscribed. My misgivings were confirmed.  Let me explain.

People pay a certain amount of money for a high-speed connection.  They pay for a service in exchange for an expected performance.  Satellite users pay five times the cost for something advertised as broadband although what they receive could not in the loosest sense, be defined as broadband. Most pages have loaded on broadband before you’ve even dealt with the 3/4 to 1 1/2 second lag that is included with each transfer request on satellite. It’s part of the beauty of satellite.  Since it’s got to send your data to the great beyond before shipping it back down to the hub where it meets up with real broadband connections, there’s a period of time in which the requesting party just waits patiently.  Load a page with fifty images(even if they’re part of the theme) and you’re looking at 50 requests that you’ll be waiting patiently on.

You can have all of this for the low, low price of just over $100.00 a month.

But wait!  There’s more!

To keep subscribers from hogging all of the lag, my provider has implemented a fair access policy that is sure to allow everyone their turn at the dribbling data fountain.  Since I pay for the highest level of service, I’m allowed 17 gigabytes of download and five gigabytes of upload, which is tallied up via a handy Google widget(see what I thought about their partnership here). Here’s what I saw four days ago:

We finally unplugged the modem and began using dial-up when it got to 99%.  Four days later, we’re back to 92%.  We pay over $100.00 a month for this privelege.

What happens if you get fapped?  Well, they tell you that your connection gets throttled until you bring your rolling thirty day percentage to below 70%(over 2 gigs has to roll off, in my case).  The speeds are supposed to mimic dial-up, but remember that 3/4-1 1/2 second lag I told you about?  Yeah, satellite can’t even compare to dial-up, when it comes to standard page loads.  So we shut down the modem.

During the period that I’ve enjoyed satellite internet, I have contacted my electrical service probably hundreds of times.  You see, they  now offer fiber optic internet through power line technology.  They simply wouldn’t give it to me since I bought a house in a neighborhood that buried it’s powerlines underground. I called, I wrote, I got neighbors to write and then I called some more.

As I look out my window during pauses between putting my thoughts to e-paper, I’m watching the world’s largest ditch-witch dig a trench, behind which they’re burying fiber optic cabling.

I’ve already subscribed for the 8gb down/3gb up service, bundled with the premium television service.  It’s a race between Wild Blue’s policy and that ditch witch.

The cost for an internet connection that is over 8 times the speed, bundled with television?  It’s over $30 a month cheaper than my Wild Blue service.

I’ll talk to you guys later.  I gotta go find my shovel.