Looking at online life through dial-up coloured glasses

[julesjones]

Not actual dial-up, mind. But the mobile broadband dongle can't find a good enough signal strength to offer me anything more than 85.6 kbps, which for all practical purposes is dial-up speed.[*] It's a much better speed than I get through the landline at $CURRENT_LOCATION, and it's my own line so I don't get complaints about hogging someone else's phone line. I'm also not tethered to the phone socket, which means I don't need to stay in the room with the tv volume controlled by $ELDERLY_DEAF_RELATIVE, who is much loved but likes the telly at a volume where I can't hear myself think. In these ways it is ever so much better than relying on my old Demon dial-up account for net access over bank holidays with the in-laws. But, you know... dial-up speeds, on a net that assumes broadband.

Also, the O2 advertising for the dongle is deceptive, although not quite an outright lie. It says it includes unlimited Openzone use. What it implies but carefully does not explicitly spell out is that it includes only Openzone's public wifi hotspots, and not the part of the Openzone network that uses a portion of bandwidth on private home and business account wifi routers to provide much broader coverage for people subscribed to that service. This means I cannot use the Openzone nodes I can see from here. Even more annoyingly, the connection management software that comes with the dongle can't tell the difference, so keeps trying to log onto the nice strong Openzone signal from next door's router, then throwing up an extremely unhelpful error message. If I'd been told when I bought the thing that it didn't include full Openzone access, I wouldn't have wasted a lot of time trying to work out what the problem with the O2 dongle's bundled Openzone wifi access was.

All of which means that at the moment I have only dial-up speed, and capped access. I'm unlikely to reach the cap, because I have to turn image loading off to get a lot of my daily use stuff to load in a usable time. Even then it's a long wait for stuff like LiveJournal to load, so it's not that I'm deliberately ignoring people, it's that it can sometimes take several minutes for a comments page to load and commenting just isn't feasible. And now I understand exactly why Twitter has driven Green Knight to screaming fury.

[* I did check the coverage map before buying, and it doesn't recommend the dongle for this postcode, so I'm perfectly happy that it's achieving a solid, reliable dial-up level of connection.]

Comments

[green_knight]

I'm sorry you're having technical problems and glad you have _something_.

Low bandwidth is one reason I prefer, when both are available, to comment at DW: For me, LJ loads the page every time I want to comment; on DW, the inline comment function still works. Makes a hell of a difference at teh speeds I get on occasion.

(I've given up on the Twitter webpage and use my iPhone. Much bettter interfact. twitter.com/mobile is a viable alternative.)

[julesjones]

It's slow and annoying, but the actual dial-up part of it seems pretty solid, and it's ever so much less stressful to not be using someone else's phone line. The mere fact that I can leave it connected in the background rather than having to log on, grab stuff and log off as quickly as possible is a big difference.

Thanks for the suggestion about twitter mobile -- I couldn't get it to work, but that's almost certainly because I have NoScript running and they weren't playing nicely together. I'll try setting it up when I'm at home for future use.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

I hear you about the elderly deaf relative. My mother spent the entirety of Christmas going 'turn it up, I can't hear what they're saying' when the volume was at ear bleeding levels. I don't think she realises how deaf she's become.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Likewise. Dad has the volume on the TV slightly louder than I'd like, which was fine during dramas, but then he'd leave the room as the titles came up, leaving me to dive for the pile of remotes when the advers/coming soon/news came on at a much higher natural volume.