My pathetic internet connection

[JoeP]

This is a rant and a whinge. If anyone reads to the end I'll be impressed. I've alluded to my low connection speed a few times, and got beyelzu worried he'd offended me, and I've been thinking about rambling on about it.

(Btw, when I'm actually hurt by a post I'll go quiet. The other reasons for going quiet are that I'm too busy to get to the site, or of course that my internet connection has dropped. So you basically can't tell if I'm upset by what you say!)

It's dial-up. At a place I used to stay about 500m away as the hadeda flies, I routinely got 56K connection speed. Here it is never above 16.8K, and often shows 12.0K. I admit to some doubt about the reported speed, because I've seen file transfers (from SA sites only) at about 4KB/s which implies about 40Kb/s rate, so the achievable speed may vary during the call. But anyway, it's bad.

The real bottleneck is the international bandwidth. There's some prioritisation going on, so customers who pay more get more use out of the international bandwidth, but not me. It's not that it's uniformly slow, but every now and then all pages (I browse a bunch of pages or sites at once 'cos I'm bored of waiting) will load slowly - and then all finish loading at once - as much as 5 minutes later.

Then there's the pricing. Call charges here are high, but they have a cool deal where (during off-peak time - 7pm to 7am and all day at weekends) you pay a maximum rate of about R8 for call however long it lasts. So you can stay on from 7pm on Friday to 7am on Monday - 60 hours - for about a cent for each 10 minutes. That makes it all neat, and I don't really need peak time access, especially not now I'm working in an office and can abuse their bandwidth.

However ... if the call drops and you redial, you pay again. They don't take fault reports seriously - first it's "take any non-Telkom equipment off the line" - you mean the computer? Of course there's no problem then. Then there's the voice-call mentality - being able to get through is enough, holding the call up is not so important. And secretly I suspect they like getting the extra money. We're getting into summer here and the line drops are getting more frequent. It could be due to electrical activity (summer storms), or rain getting into the junction boxes, or wind (as I wondered last weekend when there was a lot of wind but no rain or lightning). But you can't get them to recondition or reinstall the line to avoid these problems.

I haven't tried ordering ADSL from Telkom because they are a sick evil monopoly reporting increasing profits while gouging us. (I have tried ordering a competitive satellite-ADSL service but the supplier is not really together and has very limited coverage.) The only area where their prices are contained are national long-distance calls, because cellphones provide some kind of competition. And also because you have to sign up for 2 years and I'd be paying 2 or 3 times what I currently pay. But I'm starting to rethink this. The contract term has dropped to one year now.

And I have new demands for internet connection. My 9 year old daughter has become hooked. Atm only my computer can hook up, so she has to beg me for internet time. An ADSL connection would solve this because it would be worth getting a multi-port hub/router and linking the other computer. Secondly, she has to wait until 7pm and between dinner and bedtime it's limited. ADSL is always on so there'd be no problem using it earlier. (Of course, then we'd be into the "no internet until you've finished your homework" battles.)

This evening (shameful confession) I said she could have some internet time ... and then I found lotsa threads here I wanted to reply to. As we know, if you leave them for the next day they all revert to 'read' status, and anyway I'm in the mood now and might not be tomorrow. So I have carried on reading and typing, and saying "no, I'm still busy, no I don't know how long" when she comes in and says "Daaad, I'm booored". Mean, horrible father! Eventually she said huffily "I'm going to bed then, I've got nothing to do." But in bed she cried. And cried. And got cross with me when I was trying to comfort her and she began to realise I was right.

Don't think I really feel bad about my behaviour, just about her sadness: it's totally over the top to have a crying fit about daddy breaking a vague promise for time on the internet. And to refuse to consider anything else she could do. There's some power struggle and learning (or not yet) to deal with disappointment going on here.

But dammit, it's all because of my pathetic internet connection.

[livius drusus]

The thought of a 12 k connection is so agonizing I can hardly contemplate it. No wonder you gave a rat's ass about flood control. You have my deepest sympathies.

I feel your daughter's pain, though. I would have been much, much, much more annoying about it at her age. Not that I have any moral problems with your needing more FF than your shit connection can provide, but you could have thrown her youthful intolerance of and disproportionate reaction to frustration a bone, you know?

[JoeP]

What kind of a bone? Like sacrificing my addiction for hers? Or being caring and loving and tolerant, cos I was all that.

[Petra]

I'd have been crying, screaming, and smashing things in sheer frustration by now if I had such a shitty connection.

I went to DSL in April and haven't looked back since. I play games, watch and listen to streaming media (I couldn't watch much streaming media on my dial-up), and can download loads of cool grooves, talk on the phone while surfing, and all that jazz.

I highly recommend it. :)

[Ymir's blood]

Oh, I feel your pain. The computer I had from 2000 to about June of this year must have had some kind of hardware problems that interfered with my internet connection. It would disconnect sometimes, sometimes slow down to a crawl or just stop. I was convinced it was the phone lines even when Pesci said it was the machine. ( :poke: ) Finally I bought a new one. My aunt has the old one. I gave it to her under the condition that I never had to touch it again, no matter what it started doing....

:computer:

[JoeP]

I feel your daughter's pain, though. I would have been much, much, much more annoying about it at her age. Not that I have any moral problems with your needing more FF than your shit connection can provide, but you could have thrown her youthful intolerance of and disproportionate reaction to frustration a bone, you know?

I think JoeP is a meanie for making his daughter cry while chatting on this forum.

Yes, I'm a meanie, and I posted it on the shameful confessions thread because I was sorry about it. I want some serious feedback. Should I have stopped my reading & posting and given her the computer?

A couple of background details: she didn't actually cry then. She was crying an hour later when I thought she'd already gone to sleep (dwelling on it and getting into a state). And I didn't make a promise that I broke - normally I make a specific time and an end time too - but she did have a reasonable expectation.

The selfish angle (apart from the nitpick of how the forum software behaves) is that I felt active and interested in responding to posts (above a oneliner) for the first time in the week (for several days at least), having felt tired and down before. That was something I didn't want to lose. Today I don't feel like that (although that might be because I stayed up until 2).

[livius drusus]

I was thinking something like you could have taken a 5 minute break from posting and maybe played a game with her? That way she'd have gotten a little hit, your posting roll wouldn't have been too disturbed and luna wouldn't be the only FF parent to use the Arcade as a children's chewable narcotic.

But seriously Joe, I don't think you were mean to her and I'm sure luna doesn't either. I just remember how insanely frustrated that kind of thing would make me when I was her age. It was really intense and self-reinforcing, and even when I wanted to stop it I couldn't. Those 5 minutes might have been a help. Then again, they might have just made everything worse.

Don't listen to me, man.

[JoeP]

I appreciate the answer (especially the comment on self-reinforcing frustration - that's how it is), even though I'm going to reject it! I did spend a couple of minutes the first time round (of "I'm boooored") suggesting things we could do (no) and things she could do by herself (no). And then about 10 minutes trying to comfort her when I found how upset she was later.

She wanted to play on the internet, she didn't want my attention or anything else, and she wanted an hour or more. She's found some amazing games sites. Her favourite seems to be www.neopets.com, but anything to do with virtual pets gets her attention. She surfs the way I do, with multiple windows, only hers are loading flash games and art.

So for me it was an all or nothing decision. Fact remains, I made her cry ... or I made her make herself cry ...

[pzmyers]

I became my daughter's hero when I got a new Powerbook and gave her the old one. The birthday present she asked for and got was her own domain name: skatje.com (http://skatje.com/). We have a couple of wireless hubs scattered around the house, with fiber-optic DSL direct to the house, and several of us now have laptops, so we're kind of net crazy. I've been known to call the kids to dinner via IM. My wife and I are sitting across from each other in the living room right now, bouncing URLs to one another (ah, romance!). And when she's away at work for the week, the whole family relies on IMing MomGjerness (aim:goim?screenname=MomGjerness) and me (aim:goim?screenname=myers@mac.com).

I have had to exercise some discipline, though. My daughter isn't allowed on the computer from 6-8 in the evening, so that she'll do homework or read. If there are other jobs she's supposed to be doing, I'll sometimes give her a moratorium on computer use for a while. The most severe punishment I can give her, the one that definitely gets her to sit up and pay attention, is the threat of taking the computer away for a day. Or a week.

I think some denial of computer use is perfectly reasonable and nothing to feel guilty about. But the constant reliance on slow and clumsy dialup in an age when many kids maintain extensive social contacts via the net...now that is cruel.

[pzmyers]

To be more clear: you were in the right to refuse her. A little net discipline applied early is a good thing.

But boy, when she hits the teen years, you are going to be suffering. She's hooked now, and it's only going to get worse.

[Farren]

Joe if you can afford ADSL I highly recommend you get it. If you're in a situation where its basically a movie, a restaurant meal and a few newspapers off your budget every month its definitely worth it in your situation. Pretty soon you'll find yourself just naturally flexing your budget around it.

You can cobble together a lame assed computer for around R500-R700 than she can surf the net with and hook it up via connection sharing so she doesn't even have to use your computer. If you're not sure how to get this latter thing right call me I have half a dozen peeps I can scrounge up parts from.

[Gawen]

I went DSL about 4 years ago. Never looked back except to say...man, I wish they had this back when I started.

The other concern. I have basically a monopoly on my puter. I'm always on it. On it so much I bought a router when I bought this puter, hooked the router to the old puter and the kids now leave me alone.

Hold on a tic......RTI...(Real Time Interuption)



NO. Go outside or play Final Fantasy!!


Back. Sorry about the interuption. Besides, they have Super Nintendo, PS1, PS2 and an Xbox to play with. Can you get her an alternate form of entertainment? At any rate, I'm not all that bad. If they need the puter I let them have it. I'm glad the daughter has a boyfriend and she'll be starting college soon. Her usage has diminished greatly. And my son is grounded from all sorts of video/puter games until his grades are brought up. That'll be a while...*wicked evil snicker*

[JoeP]

I became my daughter's hero when I got a new Powerbook and gave her the old one.
That's no problem; she has fairly free use of a Pentium 1 Compaq (my wife also uses it occasionally) and unlimited use of an antique 486DX-25MHz machine with 800MB of disk.

You can cobble together a lame assed computer for around R500-R700 than she can surf the net with and hook it up via connection sharing so she doesn't even have to use your computer.
I tried setting up ICS and it was dismal. The old machine runs Win95; that was part of the problem; and my machine gets configured a certain way for work and ICS mucks that up (you can have an alternate static address when using DHCP, and that's fine, but ICS takes over everything). I will get one of those hub-router boxes.

I have basically a monopoly on my puter. I'm always on it. On it so much I bought a router when I bought this puter, hooked the router to the old puter and the kids now leave me alone.

Back. Sorry about the interuption. Besides, they have Super Nintendo, PS1, PS2 and an Xbox to play with. Can you get her an alternate form of entertainment?
See above. She's got numerous alternate entertainments. This was a struggle over disappointment and power.

The most severe punishment I can give her, the one that definitely gets her to sit up and pay attention, is the threat of taking the computer away for a day. Or a week.

I think some denial of computer use is perfectly reasonable and nothing to feel guilty about. But the constant reliance on slow and clumsy dialup in an age when many kids maintain extensive social contacts via the net...now that is cruel.
So the cruelty is in staying with low connection speeds? Now you're talking.

The denial of internet privileges has been an effective threat in the past ... but not today ... she is seriously in my wife's bad books and internet is out of bounds indefinitely. (She would rather be deprived of internet for a year than see her relatives...)

But boy, when she hits the teen years, you are going to be suffering. She's hooked now, and it's only going to get worse.
Don't I know it.
:qsigh:
:deepsigh: