Bang-Zoom-Wham

 

Ah, happy days...I’m back in the land of bandwidth. For the past month, I have been connected by a mere telephone circuit to my email and the Internet. Granted, the speed was pushing twice what I used to get by phone in Redding -- nearly 50 kbps -- although with the satellite connection up in the rural wilds, I was getting around 250kpbs as a regular download speed. Now with my DSL the downloading is bang-zoom.

It’s not such a big deal, maybe, except that when people would send me short movies or large pix -- say in the megabyte range -- it could take a long time for those electronic packets to slip-slide their unassisted way along the thin copper wires that make us a global village. Dunno exactly how DSL does its thang, but it somehow manages to send its signals many times faster through those same leetle copy wires.

And my upload speed is...breath-catching. Instead of it taking eight to ten minutes to send an audio version of SetonnoteS to the site, it’s maybe two.

What’s equally fascinating about the technology is the speed with which the whole process comes together. From the initial order to the actual delivery of the box with all the equipment is only a coupla days, something we kinda take for granted. Also, a nice touch...I never opened the installation booklet except to remove the CD which goes into the computer and then led me through the rest of the process.

They make it even easier with different colored cables and different size plugs. I suppose it’s possible to get things messed up, but I think you’d have to be not paying attention or else trying to test their instructional system. I was prepared to grimace and groan, but I didn’t have to. They’ve got it figured out, so good for them and better for us.

Indeed, they’ve got the whole process so wired that they even send an Ethernet card in the box in case you’ve got an older or unusual computer that hasn’t already got one installed, though most do these days.

The only "drawback" in being reconnected at high speed is that with the old system, I knew that there would be built-in short delays; for instance, clicking on a headline to get the news story usually meant waiting a few seconds. That might not sound like a lot, but if you spend a lot of time doing what I do, you find chores that can be done in that time. Sounds anal, I know, but it worked for me.

For those of you without a high-band connection, this report: it installs simply and saves lots of time down the line.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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