Network

We've had our new apartment for two months now, and lived there for one, all without internet. We could get some kind of connection pretty fast (through the cable-tv company for instance), but we really want a real fiber connection. The problem is that it's on the 11th floor of an old, complicated building with mostly offices, not apartments, so actually running cable through all of it is very non-trivial.

An NTT tech came by a few weeks ago and did a thorough examination of the different possible routes. The old cable canals are long since overfull with stuff, but he determined they could run the fiber through the elevator shaft. Problem is, they'd need to drill a hole from the shaft into our apartment, and that would of course need approval from building management, and approval would be all but certain.

But a couple of days ago we got the go-ahead from the building manager. So we will get fiber at home again after all! Now, the fiber installation people are heavily booked, so we won't see them before New Year, and I suspect it may not happen until February. We're looking at another couple of months without a real internet connection.

Meanwhile, we've managed to sort of find solutions. Our mobile data plans are basically a 3GB data allotment each month, with unused data rolling over to the next. But even without the high-speed connection enabled we have an unlimited use of a really slow 128kbit/s connection. And I can of course tether my laptop to the phone, and get connected that way.

128k is not fast. But it is surprisingly useful. Forget any kind of video, music and most image-related stuff. But if you stick with mostly text, and you carefully block ads, then a lot of the web is useable.

Email and chat works fine; google, most news sites, Stackoverflow and the like are all about as smooth as ever. Reddit is fine on the desktop, but the mobile app is not (crappy app). Voice-only hangouts work fine - voice audio compresses really well. SSH access to remote machines is no problem, and git could probably use smoke signals if you let it.

On the other hand: no YouTube, no Spotify, no video clips or images from family or posting my own images online, no online gaming. Searching for recipes, how-tos and that sort of thing is hopeless as that's all going to heavy websites with lots of images and video. Can't do remote backups or transfer significant data.

So yes, I miss my high-speed connection, and I eagerly await its return. But meanwhile, it turns out we're not quite so disconnected as I thought we'd be.