The MacAlba

Living in rural Australia has many benefits over town dwelling. I use my photoblog to illustrate what I see around me on a daily basis. I couldn’t go back to living with neighbours again. I fully understand that some town/city residents can make an equal statement and not understand why somebody would want to live so far from “amenitiesâ€? such as shopping centres, cinemas, night clubs, etc. Each to their own.

One of the real disadvantages of rural living, though, is the lack of the level of telecommunications connectivity that many in the western world now take for granted. We have no copper-based telco services to, or near, the house. Mobile phone coverage doesn’t extend to the house.

The telephone connection that we do have is connected via a microwave link. It gives good dial up modem connectivity, but that’s its limit. With three computers on the home wireless network, all sharing the dial-up gateway, bandwidth can be hard to come by at times.

So, I’ve taken a step forward and ordered a two-way satellite network connection. I mentioned this in an entry on my ham radio blog last week, but I now propose to document the move to two-way satellite on this blog in case others are interested.

Being mindful of my higher than average monthly download needs, and my desire for a static IP address to permit me to connect to a home server from afar or make a VPN connection to work via the corporate firewall, I ordered a 512/64 service with a 5 gigabyte monthly quota from Bordernet. This particular class of service permits me to burst up to a monthly cap of 8 gigabytes at little extra cost before the more prohibitive per-megabyte charges apply.

I was told that I could expect the service to be installed within four weeks. A week has now passed and I haven’t heard anything (I’m just impatient). I had expected, though, to hear from the installer to determine how much of an impediment the nearby small hill and trees, that I had mentioned when ordering the service, might be, and how large a dish mount might be required given that it can get pretty windy around here at certain times of the year.

So I’ll just have to sit back and wait. Being somebody who has strong views on customer service, or the lack thereof, it’s more likely that they’ll hear from me by the end of next week if I haven’t heard from them.

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