Faster than the Speed of Internet

It's been over a year since we moved in to our new home and we continue to battle with really poor internet. We were told by the sellers unequivocally (thanks spell check for that one) that there'd be no problems with internet, but that turned out to just be salesman talk.

In reality there's a problem with the infrastructure- we have none. There were no cables installed in the area at all.

Because our development is in a new suburb, which up until recently was just rolling hills of sugar cane, they say there is not enough demand yet to make it viable for Telkom, the one and only provider of telephone lines for ADSL in the country. So we've been given a temperamental little plug-in modem to use in the interim. It has to be switched on and off to wake up for a signal, even when it is awake it's sluggish and it doesn't take long for the signal to drop off and need another reboot.

I don't know much about speeds but I performed an online speed test and this was the result:



Okay it says we are faster than 56% of South Africa. Either it's taking bribes from Telkom or close on 56% of South Africa doesn't even have internet, but that's can't be accurate. And anyway, even if there are moments of the day when it's running at this speed, we certainly couldn't exactly be streaming Netflix.

But our internet woes may soon be coming to an end. The service provider has been laying cables in our road and climbing down into the manhole outside our house over the last few days, so we finally have the ever-elusive infrastructure. They say we're being set up for super-fast, cutting-edge 100 mbps fibre cable internet. Sounds like 100mbps is the Holy Grail of the Internet in this country, if not the world. It really doesn't seem to get much better than 100 mbps.

Could be too good to be true but hopefully within the next couple of weeks (maybe even days) I'll be able to share the results of our next speed test with you. That's if I'm not too busy streaming HD movies, doing software upgrades and having video chats with friends overseas! All the things we've yet to experience the uninterrupted joys of...