Legitimately Stealing Internetz
I moved in to a new house about a month ago which goes to show how little I’ve posted here. After leaving Stafford I moved back home to Newark in a nice house. It didn’t have internet as you’d expect when moving in to a new house. As a networking student I was pondering what to do about this, I saw a couple of options here which were; One: get Virgin Media installed, Two: Get BeThere installed. That’s really the only options for anyone looking to get broadband in the UK; Cable or ADSL. I was hoping I could get ADSL that way I could get a nice block of IPv4 and/or IPv6 and host various services after cancelling my co-lo server. However, being Newark the ADSL availability is rubbish and the providers I’d want to go with don’t even provide in Newark… So like many I was stuck with only one option. Virgin Media…
I gave them a go, ordered the 10mb service well in advance to avoid being without internet at the new house however they messed that up. For a start the nearest installation date was a week after moving in and the day before installation they advised they couldn’t install it just yet as they needed to do some work before they could come around, apparently 2 1/2 weeks isn’t a large enough time-range for them to get their act together.
This was going to leave me without the internet for about 2 weeks and as networking student (now with a networking degree) I thought I could solve this problem and I did!
One of the advantages of the house is that it is a stone’s throw away from my parents’ house, the house I grew up in, the house with the internet. I quickly worked there is an option three. Steal some internet from someone else. Having discovered this I noticed that the houses are near enough to setup a wireless bridge and as I have access to my parents’ house it was very easy to reconfigure everything so I could setup two D-Link DIR-615 access points running DD-WRT to provide a wireless bridge.
An hour later I had the internet. My parents have Virgin 10mb and now so do I. So I thought to myself, do I even need my own internet connection? The answer is probably not, I have access to the 10mb via the wireless link, I get 10mb speeds, I do all my downloading at night, I’m now at work all day and the wireless doesn’t affect xbox live game play… So I got my Virgin install cancelled and now I’m saving just a little bit more because I’m stealing my parents internet and they’re OK with it.
I’d recommend it to anyone, if you’re in the position to do so… I may even write a how-to on it sometime although the information is already on Google.
Gone Dark
I’ve not posted in a while as the last couple of weeks I have been busy moving house back to Stafford and during the last couple of weeks I have been without Internet at home. Work has been rather busy so I’ve not had the chance to get a sneaky post in at all. This changed yesterday when Virgin Media came around to install our new 50Mbit service. Seems to have gone well but it seems they had a little trouble getting it up to speed so it hasn’t be signed off yet as working, however later in the evening we were reaching some nice super fast speeds so its all looking good. Its quite nice and fast, I think the main benefit I’ll have from the service is it’ll allow faster remote access and we won’t see the strain when others are watching iPlayer etc. I hear Virgin are looking to roll out 100Mbit that would be awesome but I think now I want better upload speeds.
During this time of darkness though my house mates and I took ourselves to Cannock Chase. Its a forest with great landscapes and perfect for mountain biking. Non of us had ever been or done any kind of mountain biking before but we thought it would be a change and there is only so much you can do without the Internet. It was an awesome day and riding downhill was extremely fun, we headed down some steep hills which required a little bit of skill but we made it and didn’t break any bones.
A Sign Of Speeds To Come!
Just been reading a few interesting blog posts on BT Infinity and as a networking student quite excited of the speeds BT could be selling. Soon to be available but only in some areas of course BT are offering 40Mb download and 10Mb upload speeds (here). I’ve thought for a long time that ISP’s need to be increasing uploads speeds. It make sense. So many people are now uploading digital content to sites like YouTube and Facebook. Although they can download websites super fast uploading those pictures from the night before can take hours! Virgin Media have said to be testing a 200Mb package but seem to have run in to issues when finding a domestic router that can handle these speeds.
Although I would be very happy to have a 200Mb connection to the outside world I have to wonder if I’d actually use it. There are little or no services that would max out that connection or even use a substantial amount, it does open up a whole new doorway though as services and websites once bogged down by slow Internet speeds could benefit drastically. COD6 / Xbox live comes to mind as IW has dropped dedicated server support for the latest COD. I suppose I could quickly find a certain protocol to max out the connection.
I think a lot of business with lots of users would benefit from these speeds. As the connection is shared and they’d be able to host quite a lot of services internally. Instead of having to pay and arm and a leg for a leased line which sometimes isn’t all that fast or even data centre space which is quite expensive.
