High-speed comes to the country

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Zing showed up on schedule to install our high-speed connection. Due to, err, a certain geographical inaccuracy on my part, plus the fact that Zing no longer publish maps showing the exact location of their towers, the TV-mast antenna tower that we put up was not usable, barring major landscaping. Rather than delay things further, I acquiesed in allowing them to erect a small tripod-based unit on our rooftop. Their installers John and Len had it aimed in very little time and it worked when first powered on. With a bit of tweaking by Owen at their central office it was soon performing at peak speed. A 150MB download, unimaginable over dial-up, took around two hours with other things going on. Congrats to the whole team at Zing for a great job and a great service!

Tower is up, waiting for WISP

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 12:00:00 GMT

Finally! After considerable huffing and puffing, and a lot of ropes serving as a "skyhook", we got the top element in place. Guy wires for the top 10-foot segment are loosely in place (though they are not strictly necessary, they provide redundant safety), and will be finalized tomorrow. Here with great joy are some views from the top.
As always, click on either photo for a much larger version (1.5Mb).

P.S. What makes this especially maddening is that we found out from a Bell subcontractor tech (who was repairing our voice and dialup lines, which were both down for ~36 hours over Christmas!) that our phone line now runs over fiber optic cable to within about 1.5km of our house, so literally only the "last mile" is copper. Never mind that we are 15 km from the CO; Bell could enable "Sympatico high speed" in our area very easily, whenever the cost of the remoting hardware comes down...

Darwin's Theories - isp tag

High-speed comes to the country

Tower is up, waiting for WISP