I wish more bars had here, this growing need to decamp to Starbucks to get any internet stuff done is killing me.
The S.O. and I are in the new house. We were able to get the satellite in and working fairly easily with about 45 minutes effort. ( I did pay for some help-which was worth it). Internet, however, is another story. After saying that Internet by DSL would be available to the new house, Telkom abruptly changed its mind and said no-you must use LTE. “We will send you an LTE router and you will be set to 20GB usage a month”. WTF? I can go through that much data in two weeks! Two days later above said router shows up, with no SIM card. I call Telkom to find out when I will receive the SIM card and when my service will start only to be informed by a lady in German, in a rather huffy manner, that my Auftrag ( order) ist “storniert”. ( canceled) They claim it has to do with a lack of ports available in the village to provide internet to the house. And even if they could provide DSL it would only be at 2MBps. “WTF” moment number 2. Vodaphone has initially indicated they can provide DSL at 2MBps, but since Telkom owns all the lines, I am not optimistic. It does not explain the inability to do LTE whatsoever.
So, for now, the S.O. and I are doing home internet through a succession of visits to Starbucks and libraries, tethering our cell phones to the computer and I also purchased a data plan for my I-pad with a 5GB data plan. It’s a better situation than when we first moved to Germany-but for the long haul its going to suck. For now, I am drinking way more cappuccino than I should and subsisting on old movies and files on my external hard drive. I have a list of I-Tunes downloads that is just waiting in vain.
It is an interesting side note on the state of the German telecommunications industry. During one of my Starbucks trips I was able to Google, the town hall notes from our village where people in our village had complained about the lack of high-speed internet. Seems Telkom has an interesting metric of not being able to build in a village until they are sure they will get 90% usage. Even more amazing with this particular village is the speed of your internet ( assuming you can get it) is based on where you are in the village. We are in a new section-so we get slower internet-and no cable is available. Figure that one out if you can. They claim they will bring Very fast DSL to our village and the next one over by 2015. I’m not holding my breath. The city that owns all three villages ( one has VDSL already-just, not ours) is complaining to Telkom near as I could figure out by reading the German notes.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, we are enjoying the new house. It has wonderful covered back patio and porch where one can sit out in relative comfort and drink beer and eat outside when the temps get warmer. I several ways its better than our other house. However, since the work situation still sucks due to the poorly thought out and executed merger by the latest iteration of the pointy-haired boss-how long we get to live here is speculative. Maybe I should have packed the S.O. back to Alabama and our Hi-speed cable line, we had there. C’est le Guerre.
So blogging will happen when blogging can happen. Till then, I unpack, drink, enjoy my new house and hate my merged workplace.
Situation normal again.