Rick's b.log - entry 2010/06/22

Fewer b.log entries?

I did stay up to watch the sun rise on longest day. Writeup and photos soon...

Orange saga reaches an end!

Aaaanyway, my tariff is changing from 40-a-month plus 7 (international calls) plus 3 (livebox rental) to being 38 a month. (35 plus livebox rental). The international calls were included in the tariff, but if you recall the girl on the phone told me I had to accept a television decoder. The TV package is the same price, but given the decoder does NOT use WiFi and my TV is in a different room and my satellite points to a different bird (the Astra 19.2°E LNB is off a switch but the same actual wire)... it seemed like too much bother to do the TV package version. So I found the non TV version here: http://abonnez-vous.orange.fr/residentiel/forfaits/net-dualplay-plus.aspx
This will represent a saving of €12 a month for the exact same thing! Enough, more or less, to pay for my top-up health insurance (now I'm salaried and do not qualify for automatic top-up any longer - unlike the UK, the state covers 60%-70% of medical costs, it is up to you to either pay for a top-up or wing it and hope you don't get ill...).

There is even better news. My line is "evolving" to be 2 megabit. Some long, dark, distant thing about ensuring we all have 2 megabit by 2010 (which, let's face it, is a hell of a lot more realistic than us all having 100 megabit by... well, it was originally (circa 2007) to be 2012. Obviously an over-optimistic target. There's some info at http://www.bretagne20.fr/.
I am perfectly happy with 2 megabit. The Livebox claims it can sync between 3.5 and 4.2 megabits (depending on conditions), but I know that the further you push it to the limit, the more errors will occur. I used to have this when manually stepping back a modem to 33.6kbps often gave me faster downloads than when the modem was let sync at 56kbps. Likewise here, 2 megabit is twice as fast as my current speed, and within the margins of what is reasonable with the hardware.

Time to be "actioned"? Reboot my Livebox and off I go...

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