Thursday 22 August 2002

Pic of the day: The family that plays together ... OK, perhaps not. And anyway, they don't need to worry about choosing the right ISP.

Broadband?

Got a letter in the mail from Tiscali, one on my ISPs. I thought it was a bill again, but when I opened it there was an offer of broadband. ADSL, to be more exact. They claimed to be able to deliver ADSL where I live, and the introductory price was quite comfortable. At barely kr 400 ($55) a month it would cost less for a year than what I paid for three months earlier this year. (Admittedly those three months were largely spent playing Dark Age of Camelot, and were before I got Morrowind and The Sims on Holiday which are both offline games.) The slowest speed would still exceed what I get now, even if the real speed should be only half of what they claim. (And it quite possibly is – broadband suppliers tend to greatly exaggerate the speed, according to independent research.)

Anyway speed is not important. Or rather it will not be important when I no longer pay for each minute I stay connected. I could leave my computer downloading a single file all night at no extra cost. Actually this is not likely since I don't download movies or games from Warez sites. Once upon a time I downloaded some episodes of anime ("Japanese cartoons" – don't call them that if you are within slugging range of an otaku, a fan of Japanese serial art). The way I understood it, these were movies that were not for sale. Anyway, the sites disappeared one by one. So I am not likely to have any big downloads. Still, it would be nice to be able to actually use this nifty feature in Opera: I have my favorite online comics collected in one Bookmark folder, and in theory I could just click to open them all at once. But in practice there are so many of them, I prefer to open a few at a time. Then I open the next few in the background while I read the first, and so on. Because we don't want to stay online longer than necessary; every minute counts. (Actually it costs only around $1 an hour, but it's the principle that counts!)

***

Anyway, now that it seems possible to get broadband, I'm not sure if I want to buy it. I know what I have, but I don't know what I get. First, I'm not sure it will even work. I have checked in the past, and Telenor (the former telephone monopoly which still has the phone centrals) did not provide ADSL in my area. Since Tiscali would need to use Telenor's centrals, it may be that they simply haven't checked. But even if the local phone central is now ready for ADSL, my connection is special. I have two phone lines, one of which I use for Internet and the other rarely at all; but this allows people to call me while I am online. Not that this happens every month, or every other month for that matter. But it does happen. There is only one physical line into the house, so I have a box on the wall which separates the signals into two lines. I'm not at all sure that this setup would work with ADSL. I am also not sure that I would get my money back when it doesn't work. I'm not even sure I would get my phone line back without extra costs.

And speaking of extra costs, I would have to buy a network card for the computer. For the portable computer I would need another type of card, which frankly wouldn't be worth it since I'm only online a few minutes each month on average, to download upgrades for my software. Chances are I would spend quite a bit of money and then none of it would work and I would have to revert to the same old. Poorer but wiser. But why not be wise first and save the money?

Still, I guess it is worth looking into, just in case. Especially when Sims Online arrives... if it does.