T'internet - just another little moan...

There we have it t'internet; and it is exactly that in our little backwater in the UK. Half a meg and £25 per month for the privilege. Bet there are a lot of other people out there who are paying through the nose for not very much. Have a look at some of those test your broadband speed sites and see if you are really getting what you paid for. It is quite scary how many people are not!
One of my favourite sites is Broadband Speedchecker despite what TalkTalk, BT. Virgin, Sky and various others say in my area you cannot get decent broadband speeds because we are too far away from the exchange. Doesn't stop the phone companies from trying to promise things they can't deliver and they will fudge the language around so much that in the end you land up thinking the whole lot are a load of charlatans.
There are a number of black spots in the UK and around those a whole load more brown spots, places where you can get broadband but not as fast as they will try to lead you top believe.
So before you sign up to a two year contract mosey on down to the speed checker sites for your area and challenge what these companies are selling cos in the end the small print is going to say its your own fault for not looking at the semantics in the first place!

Am I out of the ether yet? The joy of living in a broadband black spot.

Call me odd but when I have no broadband connection I’m OK. Really. I. Am. Fine. I can’t work but everyone needs a break from that don’t they? All work and no play makes jack a dull boy and all that. Sometimes it is quite good to be in a broadband black spot.

But I get a tad upset when I am neither one thing nor the other. I get upset when I am nearly connected but not quite because that means I have to work even though my work isn’t actually all going to get there. Today I lost a potential job worth £200 because my broadband failed at the "moment juste" and I landed up missing the deadline. Great.

On top of that I got tagged but I don’t know why. It was exceedingly frustrating. I tried to raise twitter on my mobile but to be honest I’m not actually sure how to do that and all I got off Exmoor Jane’s blog was a rather alarming picture of a yawning cat. I do not know why I have been tagged and what that tag has to do with a yawning cat. However much I tried, and I promise I did try all day, I have yet to be illuminated on this point. I even went to such lengths as seeing if I could sneak a peek on one of the computers at school and failing miserably because twitter is banned as an inappropriate site. Thank God there are no wailing alarms on those machines as I don’t know quite how I would have explained myself and why I was hunched on a small child’s chair trying to hack into a site on one of the school computers.

I spend a lot of time waiting for my broadband connection to connect sometimes it is fantastic, sometimes slow and always it is unpredictable.

I get it through the ether as BT cannot connect me and as one delightful soul at their head office said once the only way they will connect me is if I move. Bless ‘em for their consideration.

I read today that Suffolk is to get some help to get connected, I won’t hold my breath. For even though the county may get help, it certainly won’t be to connect out of the way villages. Actually my village isn’t out of the way it’s just that it is at the end of a line and by the time it reaches us it’s exhausted and we barely raise half a Meg (512). I am at the far end of the village so that half a Meg gets disconnected a lot as well as more and more people try to connect to the outside world and even though TalkTalk and all the others say: “Of course we can connect you!” The tech boys who have to plug it all in say: “Don’t bother it won’t work.” So in our village I’ve heard that kids have to go and do their homework with friends in to other villages or else trek down to the library, which is due to close.

The reason why BT won’t do anything about it is there are too few of us to matter. So we go our own way and I get my broadband over the ether and pay through the nose for the privilege. Problem is when it goes wrong there is only a tiny little company that can put it right and I worry about their ability to stay afloat. I have to pray they will or else I will lose my job.

So does anyone out there know how I can get broadband without using a telephone line….I really do want to stay connected and call me weird but I also want to stay in my own home while I do it…