02.10.07
The Street of Broken Broadband Dreams, Chapter 24
After a fabulous January, where we enjoyed a long and luxurious streak of clear (or at least only partly cloudy skies), we have arrived at February, with the inevitable return of the winter rains that I so dreaded in December. The Boss flogged me ceaselessly to get the new greenhouse built (and at least partly covered with panels) before the heavens opened up. Naturally, I obliged, knowing my place in the grand order. The greenhouse itself came entirely in pieces, and was put together with great gnashing of teeth over the wretchedly written instructions (clearly written by someone who had never built on of these greenhouses, let alone taken a technical writing class). The entire story of the greenhouse will undoubtedly be told in a future post. For now, suffice it to say that it is standing and (mostly) keeping the weather out.
After about two months of using our interim broadband solution, we’ve come to realize that indeed, it is only a distant cousin to true broadband, and doesn’t quite fit our expectations for fast, reliable, “prosumer”-class Internet speeds (including glorous BitTorrent nights and unabashed iTunes video and podcast downloads). I find myself continuously trying to keep a mental tally on the amount of bits we’ve slurped over the airwaves, wondering how much closer to the dreaded 5GB limit that our service provider imposes. Hence a pattern emerges:
The Boss: “I’ve purchased a subscription to 24 on iTunes. I’ve missed four episodes because the TiVo is dead.”
(Aside: our venerable circa 1999 DirecTivo died and was replaced by a grand 160GB upgraded Series 2 model from Weaknees. Yes, it is muy macho. However, the Weaknees replacement was going to show up a day late for the start of the next season of 24.)
Me: “Hmm, that’s going to be a problem.”
Inside my head: Holy crap, we’ll hit the 5GB cap in no time.
The Boss: “It’s no big deal, only 250MB per episode.”
Me: “But it doesn’t take that many to add up to 5 gigs.”
The Boss: (deflated) “Hmm, good point.”
Don’t get me wrong. The Boss went ahead and downloaded them, because to deny her Jack Bauer and his ridiculous antics would be asking for my left eyeball to be plucked out and used as a cat toy. Anyhow, my paranoia has generally increased, and my discomfort at being subject to what I consider arbitrary restrictions on my usage of the Interweb is distracting me from doing what I’d like to be doing online. So, to ensure I can live online undistracted by such limits, I have once again taken up the quest to link our house to the antenna that sits forlornly up at the vineyard, powerlessly (literally) pointing to Sonoma Mountain and our future lifeline to the net.
I spent the next couple days enjoying my lunch break by browsing our favorite giant orange home improvement center. It seems that, based on their prices, we should be able to get the quantity of conduit and pipe necessary to go the distance for somewhere upwards of $400-500. Then we add the apparent price of fiber optic (on the order of $800), the rental of the trencher (for who knows how much) and finally, the solar equipment up at the vineyard to power the rig (somewhere in the $2500 range). Suddenly, this is looking like a job that will run us between 1/3 and 1/2 of the Wunderkind’s nasty $16k bid to do the job that I knew we could do ourselves.
Yup, Winter is a little bit past the halfway mark, and it’s time to get busy again.