| Home > Technology > Moving home: taking technology into account when making the move, and Apple comes to the rescue! |
| Moving home: taking technology into account when making the move, and Apple comes to the rescue! | | Date Created: 31 Aug, 2005, 09:05 AM |
 I've been slack with my blogging for the past few weeks, due in the main to moving home/office and losing my cable modem connection.
Nowadays, adding pain to moving home (which scores high on most people's scale of modern-day stresses) is the search for a home and location which permits the continuation of always-on broadband internet connection. It is simply unreasonable after 10 years of broadband to go back to dial-up, except temporarily.
Looking around at potential homes, I would almost reflexively check the house's connectivity, in the hope that my Optus cable connection could be continued without fuss - meaning, it already had an outlet so that it would only mean the flip of a switch to have my service continue. And without the loss of my 5-year old Optus email address to which most of my discussion list email goes.
But in the end, the home I chose, just 500 metres from my previous home, was not equipped with Optus cable (and never likely to be), but with its competitor's, Telstra's Bigpond. I refuse to use that product, even though I still have a Telstra cable modem from the early days of cable in Australia - when 100MB a month was considered "sufficient"!
Curiously, a few days after I formally concluded my relationship with Optus, a technician appeared at the old house to physically remove the connection from the street, which seems an odd way to conduct business, since the next occupant may desire the service. Go figure, because I can't.
So for the first time ever, I had to sign up for an ADSL account. I chose a Perth, Western Australia company, iinet, for my ISP mainly because its roadmap shows it plans to introduce ADSL2+ in the near future. Optus also had ADSL which would have allowed me to continue my email address, but their roadmap is rather vague with respect to very fast ADSL. (The day my service commenced, iinet announced availability of its own VoIP service, and a new modem to allow very cheap calls to be made.)
As it was, in order to continue my email supply uninterrupted, I switched many of my discussion list subscriptions to my .Mac account (lesposen@mac.com). In a sense, it's like having a permanent email address no matter who your ISP may be... very handy, although I reached my mail quota on the basic .Mac plan very quickly. Still, it offered me an incentive to clean out my mail account of unnecessary or out-of-date emails of yore to keep below quota.
iinet quoted 5-10 days for the ADSL to be switched on at the local exchange, and indeed it came on the 5th day after my application was accepted (following tests on the line presumably and moving up the queue).
In the meantime, iinet gave me free dial up connectivity, which I used via my trusty old original Airport Graphite with its built-in modem. Very glad I didn't eBay it when I got my Linksys WRT45G wireless router - the Airport and its cousin, the Airport Express now come with us when we travel. The Express is great for hitting Internet cafes, so two Powerbooks can share a connection for the price of one. Most store owners allow us an ethernet connection, and think the Express is a power supply. The Airport Graphite is used in hotel rooms only equipped with dial up (fortunately now getting rare) so again we can both share a connection, albeit a slow one.
The transfer to iinet ADSL has been relatively painless, and the ISP is well-equipped to handle Mac OS X queries. One thing which slipped under my radar of knowledge was adjusting my Mail out. With iinet dial up, sending my .Mac email was not a problem, but with ADSL the IMAP-based .Mac email would not send unless I changed my address in Mail to my iinet-based address.
A quick call to support suggested a modification to Mail's preferences, such that for my .Mac email (I have three .Mac email accounts), my outgoing server address be switched to iinet's - which worked a treat. Such as small piece of knowledge with such a massive result.
However, I can't seem to work out how to network the D-Link ADSL 502T router I purchased (which can be flashed to ADSL2+ later) with the Linksys so as to achieve wireless connectivity through the house.
So for now until I work out this piece of black magic, the Powerbook is connected via a long ethernet cable, and visitors with wireless can share the connection via the Powerbook's ability to act as a wireless base station.
(UPDATE: I switched on ethernet bridging on the Apple Airport, connected it to the D-Link and boom, wireless throughout the house. While the Airport is only "B" rated, not G, I won't notice it unless I try to network with another computer in the house. If it's a visiting Powerbook, we'll just use direct connectivity using iChatAV and Bonjour).
The ADSL connection (1500/256) is slower down than the Optus cable (actually, only half as fast according to GoogleEarth's ability to show speeds in my area); but it's faster up, since Optus maxes out at 128. My iinet connection under test came in around 180. I am sure Optus cable is not optimised for the Mac, as my ADSL seems as fast as my cable was on the download.
The next piece of effort is to get podcasting again, expand the .mac account to allow for more files and expected traffic, and probably get a domain name to make the next move even more transparent.
So often, I hear people troubled when they move house or change ISPs - having a permanent address seems to be one easy way around this problem, and with greater competition between ISPs, leading to more churn (I decided not to go on a contract and forgo free connection and modem), it seems this is the best way to maintain email connectivity transparently.
Sooner or later, like cellphones, we will each have our own transportable internet connections, using some variation of wif-fi allowing not just continuous connectivity when we move home or office, but on the move as well. This portability, at broadband speeds, seems to be the next iteration of the connectivity Holy Grail.
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