Life without modern technology is hard; really bloody hard.
I had not accurately assessed how dependent we would be on the Internet after our move from California to Amsterdam. It seems that, these days, everyone requires you to fill in forms on-line, be able to send and receive e-mail, manage your account with them via the Web, etc., etc. I knew that we would need an Internet account before very long, of course, but I had no idea that life would come to a virtual standstill without Net connectivity.
Anyway, that was remedied today, when our do-it-yourself ADSL kit arrived in the post. The KPN had said in a letter that we received last Saturday that it could take up to four business weeks, but it actually took only a couple of days for the package to arrive. The postman had been trying to deliver the package for the last couple of days, but we haven’t been at home, so today I collected it myself from the post office on the Singel.
I had to visit a hardware shop to buy a set of screwdrivers in order to remove the wood panelling behind our front door, which is home to the house’s telephone cabling, cable TV wiring and other crud. That’s where I had to connect the DSL modem and stow the related wiring.
Anyway, we’re now up and running via XS4ALL (my ISP for more than 10 years already) with 3200 kbps downstream and 768 kbps up: very respectable. That’s about three times the downstream bandwidth I had in Mountain View and twice the upstream. This package costs €60 per month. For another €20, we could have 8 Mbit downstream, but that seems excessive, even by my spoilt Silicon Valley standards. Maybe we’ll get that one when we buy our own house!
Interestingly, the KPN had warned me that we may be too far from the central office (CO) to be able to get stable DSL service here, but that must surely be a mistake, as we’re in the centre of the city and my initial tests indicate that we’re getting close to the maximum of the bandwidth reserved for us.
Our land-line has obviously also been connected. An engineer came here on Tuesday to fix that for us, so we now have a fixed phone, a mobile phone and DSL. All that remains on the communication front is to get Sarah a mobile phone and we’ll be as reachable as we were back in California.
Anyway, it’s time to catch up on e-mail and all of the other things that have been happening unbeknownst to us whilst we were reduced to unwilling techno-trogladites.
I’ll post more on our adventures here, both good and bad, over the next few days.
Line loop length is pretty independent of where you are, it just depends how they ran the wire.
My last place was like 500 feet from Oracle, which has massive network connectivity, but because of how they ran the lines, I was 6700 meters away from the source, which is about 2200 meters too far.