Internet update - August 2008

In June we had to have a business line installed at our house in addition to the house phone line. My experience with telcos is that if you are paying business line fees you tend to get a more attentive service, so when it was being installed we enquired about having broadband on the line.

I already knew that ADSL broadband (or Aliant Highspeed as they call it) is available for the next door property which is about 2km from us so wondered if they would take a chance on us as a business customer.

The very helpful person from Aliant said she would try to find out and a few weeks later we got a call telling us that Aliant had recently extended the range of their broadband product.

We actually decided to put the broadband on the home phone line as it was cheaper and it was a home connection we wanted it for. Unfortunately the customer service people for "home products" were either not aware of the change in range or for some technical reason could not order the ADSL service. The business staff instigated the order for us and an appointment was made to visit two days later for an install.

I did not want to get my hopes up after previous installation appointments for other services had ended in disappointment. In fact when they came they could not get a signal on our home phone line but the clever engineers swapped the business and home phone line over so that the home phone was now on a newer cable and bingo we got a connection.

We are on the lowest speed (up to 1.5mb) connection and we do only get just over 1mb download. This is however over three times faster than our satellite internet connection and for the first twelve months it is almost half the cost.

The upload speed is also a big bonus with uploads now averaging 425k - over 6 times faster than the 63k we could typically expect on satellite.

So far we have been very happy with the reliability and speed of the connection - it even works when it rains.

Does anyone want to buy a satellite dish and modem?