The internet has landed!

We finally have internet! It's costing us a fortune for the fraction of bandwidth we had back home, but it's peanuts compared to the $1 per TEN MEGABYTES lots of hotels ask for here thanks to the assholes at Zenbu. Seriously, these jerks actually suggest turning off Windows Updates to save bandwidth "as the updates are often large, not generally essential and downloading them can use a lot of data quickly". Considering that even if you go over your limits on DSL it's only costing about $2 per GB these guys are advertising and perpetuating a huge markup, they're in something like 800 cafes and hotels. Ridiculous.

Anyways, we went with Orcon for our DSL and just 12 hours into it I'm quite happy with it so far. A speed test earlier got me 10 megabits of download speed, not bad considering we're in a town of under 3000 people.

It seems like the telephone lines and DSL equipment necessary to connect everyone in NZ is owned/managed by one company, Chorus, who used to be a part of Telecom NZ but now seem to be separating... everyone selling DSL in the country does it via PPPoE logins I guess. Seems to work well, makes the last mile not the bottleneck as it seems to be managed quite well. Now all New Zealand needs is a better pipe to other countries (like the USA perhaps?)

Anyways, I'm glad to be back online. Now we can blog more! And do some work and make some money! Phew. It's been an expensive couple weeks!

Celebrating our Internet purchase by blogging about it!

Oh, and though it really felt like I was blowing through my 2GB/month allowance on my phone, I finally found the place where you can check your Telecom NZ mobile balance, and it turns out I had only used 466MB so far! Yay... Now off to waste some phone bandwidth!