Saturday, February 28, 2009
Frustration!
Isn’t this the 21st Century? Isn’t Germany a highly-technical society? Haven’t high-speed internet and DSL been around for YEARS? Then why is it that my village (and so many others) doesn’t have any of these advantages!?!! I have internet access via a cell phone provider, using a USB “stick” with a cell phone sim card because the only other options were dial-up and unsecure wireless (which also wasn’t terribly speedy).
When I was in Garmisch last month, the stick worked exceptionally well at more than 7 mbps. I didn’t know what I was missing until that trip. Now I’m back to my standard less than 50 kbps connection! Yup, you read correctly, 50 KILOBYTES per second. When I connect, I always get the notice that my connection speed is 238 kbps, but I have yet to see anything that quick in use. I always have “good bars” -- four or five bars -- showing at the bottom left indicating that I should have good signal strength. I sit next to a window, and sometimes I even carry my laptop up to the third floor hoping for better signal strength...often to no avail.
When I try to visit sites, I get this notice more often than I’d like. Sometimes, my internet craps out on me entirely, closing out all of my web browsers (email, blog dashboard and any other sites I may have open at the same time -- even if they’re static pages and already 100% downloaded). You can see the green and yellow lines completely disappear in the middle of the top image when that happened. Then my connection speed crawled again when I tried to open a single web page.
Uploading photos can take upwards of 5 minutes each. Uploading video is a non-starter (I go to the library to do that). Downloading or viewing video (like of my niece and nephew) takes a while to buffer. Downloading attachments from email also takes a while.
So, I’ll continue to do my best. I’ll continue to be frustrated. But, I’ll continue to update. Just be patient with me. Sometimes it’s really not my fault when I can’t get a new post added!
When I was in Garmisch last month, the stick worked exceptionally well at more than 7 mbps. I didn’t know what I was missing until that trip. Now I’m back to my standard less than 50 kbps connection! Yup, you read correctly, 50 KILOBYTES per second. When I connect, I always get the notice that my connection speed is 238 kbps, but I have yet to see anything that quick in use. I always have “good bars” -- four or five bars -- showing at the bottom left indicating that I should have good signal strength. I sit next to a window, and sometimes I even carry my laptop up to the third floor hoping for better signal strength...often to no avail.
When I try to visit sites, I get this notice more often than I’d like. Sometimes, my internet craps out on me entirely, closing out all of my web browsers (email, blog dashboard and any other sites I may have open at the same time -- even if they’re static pages and already 100% downloaded). You can see the green and yellow lines completely disappear in the middle of the top image when that happened. Then my connection speed crawled again when I tried to open a single web page.Uploading photos can take upwards of 5 minutes each. Uploading video is a non-starter (I go to the library to do that). Downloading or viewing video (like of my niece and nephew) takes a while to buffer. Downloading attachments from email also takes a while.
So, I’ll continue to do my best. I’ll continue to be frustrated. But, I’ll continue to update. Just be patient with me. Sometimes it’s really not my fault when I can’t get a new post added!
Labels: Germany, Pam's thoughts
