Tales and thoughts from the founder of NormSoft (maker of Pocket Tunes), working and living in St. Croix, USVI

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Our new ISP, Broadband VI, still hadn't updated our network speed as of yesterday. In addition, the network was getting flakier and flakier. We would regularly have outages of an hour or more every day or two, and the uplink bandwidth was degrading to as low as 20kbps.

I called last night to let them know, and this morning a tech came out and switched us over to their other network, replacing the radio receiver. Now I am getting burst speeds of 3Mbps down and 1Mbps up! Glad to finally have state-side Internet speeds again. So far, I'm very happy with the service.

The only downside is we are behind two private networks via NAT. I used to have a security camera that I could look at while away from home as well as a remote login on my Linux box that I could access while traveling. In order to make those work now, I will need to set up a reflector on a public server somewhere. That seems like an acceptable price to pay for the better speed, but it's a bit of an inconvenience.

Of course the real test of the ISP is to see how often they have outages. That's something I'll just have to wait and see.

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