As I mentioned earlier, it’s not about speed, solely. Reliability is crucial, and top priority. That currently excludes 4G. I couldn’t care less about the 160 Mbps thing, as that’s so much faster than I need, probably 10 times faster than I need. Good point about the her guests thing. We imagined originally that we were going to do that, and I bought a lot of expensive hardware, but as it turned out, Janet doesn’t want to have to administer it, it doesn’t make any money, only costs some money, and if we change our minds and do decide to go for it we would offer guests a WLAN connected to 4G. And because that keeps them off our own LAN we don’t have any worries about security, which has already been dealt with however, and concerns about guests’ network-hogging, which would have to be dealt with by rate-limiting if we were going to have only one subnet. So we can change our minds and the lowest risk option is 4G-to-WLAN. The final thing is that guests never ask about internet connections; they all have mobile phones, there’s good 4G and if they have the wrong SIM then they can get the right SIMs locally at low cost. Perhaps they don’t ask about internet because they want to get away from all that.
I understand Black Sheep’s point and agree. I am putting up barriers in a way, but not for the sake of it. I’d be happy with say Zen, and did indeed use them for a year, but switched to AA only, rather than running both ISPs because AA had a far richer range of services and much more comprehensive support. The support I get from AA is hugely important for three reasons: firstly I have a lot of faults, which will go away in the far distant future one day; secondly I get support that is more than just ISP support as they support my Firebrick FB2900 to a fantastic extent; thirdly I’m not with-it, whereas you all are 100% compos mentis but I’m exhausted and full of pain drugs half the time, so I have huge needs which don’t apply to you.
Remember points 2 and 3: AA is more than just an ISP and I’m not ‘normal’ whereas you are. So I hope that makes sense. If I’m ever away in hospital and out of it I know that Janet can just call AA about anything and it’s always their problem, with no buck-passing. And probably I’ll ask them to supply my next WLAN hardware so I can get free config and free support too. AA is fantastic for disabled users, and for people such as me and my wife who are both telephone-phobic: can always do IRC/SMS/email instead.
You all on the other hand find download speed very very important, don’t have many faults, don’t have problems you can’t fix/diagnose yourself because of your unusually high expertise and only want ISP support and no other facilities. Don’t care about geeky things like IPv4 blocks and domain name definitions (can get latter from DNS hosting companies).
I’m now moving all my important domain names to AA after I screwed up, in a drug-addled state, and missed a renewal allowing an evildoer to grab the domain tlachd.com (iirc) for which I had to apologies to my wife in horrible embarrassment at having let her down. With AA’s domain hosting, you can never forget a renewal because they take care of it all for you and just bill you for it. It’s a bit expensive but the 100% reliability is crucial so definitely worth the money. I seem to remember that some employee of Coca-Cola screwed up a domain renewal of maybe (guessing) cocacola.de or something (I really have no idea!) and a student lad took it over. Presumably someone got the sack. Luckily my wife didn’t sack me.
One more point. You only ever ‘see’ me on my good days. When I’m not with it or in bad pain I can’t write to you all. Like earlier tonight when my neighbour came round to give me morphine at 01:00, because Janet is currently in hospital. I now feel well enough to write this post. So it might appear that I’m better than I actually am. I have this problem with some NHS people.
> is only available to properties that are connected to a fibre enabled PCP, even if that cabinet is too fast away to receive service.
Thanks, I didn’t know that. And I don’t understand PCPs clearly. I didn’t know fibre comes anywhere near them. I thought they were a copper-only thing that would go when PSTN goes, but what do I know, don’t know where I got that idea from.