 The Internet - In Sydney I'd enjoyed the luxury of an ADSL connection to the internet. One of the first things I checked when we contemplated moving to the bush was the availability of ADSL. I was overjoyed to discover that the local exchange was indeed ADSL ready. I knew that that for ADSL to work reliably one needed to be within close proximity to the exchange. What I dodn't know until I applied for my ADSL connection was that we were just under two kilometres too far from the exchange for my beloved connection to be installed.
Distraught I wept into the phone to the Telstra operator "But I must have broadband. I must." The operator just cringed and essentially said "Bad luck"
Displaying the spirit that has made this nation great, I went to my dad and said "What will I do?" He suggested two-way satellite. I laughed and said "There's no such thing." He said "Well don't listen to your old man then."
So as you can see from the photograph above, I now have two-way satellite installed. It works ok. Not as good as ADSL, although once you start a long download it is generally faster than ADSL. The thing I hate is the latency. You see it takes a finite amount of time for the little microwaves to hurtle out of my transmitter, reflect of my dish and hit a satellite called "Asia Sat 3" and then bounce back to someplace in Dallas and come back to me. Half a second to be precise. That's hald a second everytime there's any to-ing or fro-ing between my computer and "the net."
But it's better than a modem!
Gavin, who came out to install the dish, was a likable chap. He drove all the way from Grafton and worked pretty much solidly to get me up and running. There were a few hicups along the way including the fact that the computer someplace in Dallas hadn't been told that Victor was having his dish connected today, and wasn't expecting to hear from me. He got on the phone to Telstra for about an hour and got things sorted out though.
When he left it was working - but very s-l-o-w-l-y. I rang Telstra to complain and eventually was connected soe a pleasant enough chap who agreed with me that 64k was "miserably slow."
We did a whole lot of speed tests and then he had me download and install TweakMaster Pro. I thought "Here we go" but after applying one of the master's tweaks I had a staggering 640k download speed. Wonderful stuff.
4:04:28 PM 
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