We finally have internet again! It took four months, two visits, and a construction approval to get our fibre-optic connection, and we finally did. I spent the first hour running OS updates on all our machines while grinning from ear to ear.
Four months may sound ridiculously long. But in all fairness, we could have gotten a network connection through a cable-TV company in two weeks or less. That would have had a pretty bad upstream speed, though (6Mbit/s), and we wouldn't have had IP telephone (which Ritsuko uses a lot).
A real fibre-optic connection gives us a high-speed, low-latency bidirectional connection and IP telephone for slightly less than the cable-TV connection would have cost. But our building is a bit weird, and there is no existing fibre network on the upper floors.
This is a mixed-use building, with a television company as the main tenant. There's a TV-mast on the roof and everything. Every cable conduit in the building is already full with cabling, and rerouting other things to make space would risk disrupting the businesses renting there. They had to run our fibre up through an elevator shaft, then drill through the walls for a conduit into our apartment. I'm surprised and grateful they agreed to do it at all. Total installation cost? 1500 yen... I almost feel bad.
Anyway, a quick test showed me getting about 140Mbit/s down, and 250Mbit/s up, with a 54ms latency. Not as good as we had in our previous place, but more than good enough. It should vary a lot by time of day, and weekday evenings, when I tested, tend to be slow. I'm happy.
