Exactly one month ago, on a Saturday morning, I received an SMS message from the phone company, notifying me that my application for an ADSL line has been approved. All I had to do was to visit them, sign the contract and pick up the router. It does sound nice and easy, doesn’t it? Professional even. That’s if you don’t know the rest of the story…
I’ve submitted the application more than 3 and a half years ago! Yes, years – it was on February 17th, 2005. I’ve given up any hope that such a technological advance would ever reach my doorstep. As the dial-up connection was far too slow for my work, no wireless access points anywhere in sight, no cable company interested in providing internet access, I’ve decided to go for a satellite connection. It was faster than the dial-up (up to 2Mbit/s downlink with OpenSky’s SatSurf subscription), but it was a one-way connection and there was the uplink problem. I used the old dial-up for a few months, but finally decided to try a GRPS/EDGE subscription from my mobile phone company. And it worked OK… It had its downsides (satellite round-trip delay, configuration issues both on Windows and Linux and it simply involved a lot of hardware), but it was far better than the alternative.
Now it all feels like a bad dream I had a very long time ago. I’ve also added a wireless router to the mix – all computers can access the internet, nice and easy. I simply love happy endings 
