BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Connected!

Connected

Posted: 24 Sep 2014 03:45 AM PDT

It took a month and ten days to get Ye Olde Chapel connected to the internets. But when the engineer finally arrived this morning he seemed to know what he was doing. We had quite a bit of fun trying to trace the phone line through the house. The previous occupants of the house were shonky DIYers so nothing is very logical. At the height of the confusion the engineer dubbed them DDIYers (don’t do it yourself-ers). But it was worked out in the end, and so far is running smoothly. Hopefully this means that normal blogging service will soon be resumed! I certainly have quite a backlog of pickturs that I would like to blog, and we remain forever hopeful that James might think of some interesting words to share.

It is very fortunate that the common man now demands unfeasibly fast internet to stream video and play games. For Blue Skies Research our usage boils down to downloading data to analyse later which is, by comparison, a light demand. A few years ago it would have been impossible to consider working from home using a normal home connection, but not any more. Having said that, one big reason why we chose to live in inner-city Settle (population 2,421), rather than out of the way on some hilltop, was the “super-fast” internet. Fast broadband was already fast here, and fibre was due to arrive shortly. It think it will come to most places in the National Park within the next few of years, but it didn’t seem sensible to try and survive for any length of time on 1-2Mbps, as it really isn’t sufficient for doing science. We paid the few pounds extra to get fibre, but it isn’t fibre right to the door, just to a “cabinet” about 300m away. From there the signal travels down ye olde copper cables. This is probably just as well, as our external telephone line appears to be underground, but it limits the speed to a maximum of 20Mbps.

I have got LOTS of paper reading to catch up on now. An 8 month backlog sits in my Google Reader!