Satallite of love

Nothing to do with Lou Reed, but I really like our new place. Apart from the long term potential for salt damage and being face on to the prevailing wind, there is much to like. However, Broadband speed is beyond poor. So we now have in place 2 of the 3 elements which makes it viable to live and work from home in 2012.

• 0.5 MB ADSL from our friends at B.T. Yes, you did say we would get 3MB and you have said sorry for being a little off the mark. And we know the money that you are getting from WAG for super fast broadband will make zero, zilch difference to the speed of our broadband. This does home phone and VPN sunray connection. Sunray is fine over this once it is logged in.
• 0.5 MB ADSL business line from our friends at B.T. if they can ever get it working. Only been 4 weeks now. Will do voice and Vodafone Suresignal over this, plus a backup for vpn (not highly available as it is over the same pair of wires)
• 8MB over Broadbandwherever Satalite Broadband which we have had for 2 weeks now used my the boss and myself for email, web, etc. 20 notes a month plus 600 quid for install which Welsh Assembly Government paid for. 

 So we can manage. The Satalite can't do vpn, so in effect it is not usable for real business use. I can't understand why WAG pay up for it, rather than hold B.T.'s toes to the fire.

What I have learend about Satallite is

1. Don't even think of using it on Saturday morning, it never works
2. Open up your TCP buffers. On OSX this was easy to find via Google, but well worth it
• kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16777216
• net.inet.tcp.sendspace=1048576
• net.inet.tcp.recvspace=1048576
3. Install the satspeed plugin for firefox (and move to firefox from Chrome et al).

The last one makes a big difference.

Our next step is once the fast roll out happens sometime in the next 3 years is to find someone who gets fast broadband from B.T., offer to pay for their boardband and set up a wireless link (will need line of sight). So if you live in south Aberaeron, can see Aberystwyth from your house and want your Broadband paid for, give us a shout. Assumes fast broadband makes it to Aberaeron.