Updates have been pretty rare lately, and I'm sorry about that. 3 weeks ago I went to the electronics shop to set up an appointment for broadband internet installation. I was told that since I don't have a home phone line (which is necessary for ADSL), it would take three weeks for them to come out and activate the service. My predecessor described this arduous task as "flipping a switch". Who knows--maybe it's a really big switch.
Stef set up a doctor's appointment for Mia for Wednesday the 22nd (yesterday), so I needed to call and let the internet people know that we wouldn't be there that day (they gave us a three day window, from Wednesday to Friday). When I called the English tech support line on Monday, the lady told me that I had given them the wrong address, and that I needed to fix it before they'd come out--and I'd have to wait another 3 weeks after fixing the address. I checked the paper carbon copy of the application that I had filled out, and lo and behold, I had written the address correctly. The person doing the data entry had left out the words "dai" and "ichi" in front of the building which together basically mean "number one" or "first". Never mind the fact that in my ward, Katayama, there are no other Tamai buildings. This was apparently a very serious problem. Of course, I've already received mail from the internet company at that address since filling out that application. But whether mail could be delivered or not, a missing "number one" just wouldn't do.
So, I got on the phone to fix the address that I had correctly given, but I had to call the Japanese customer service line. After waiting on hold for about 15 minutes, I gave up and decided to find a different internet service provider. That turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise--our new provider is actually about 10 bucks cheaper per month, and it's much faster. With YahooBB, we would have paid about 58 dollars a month for 12Mbps service, but since it's ADSL and we live far from the relay center, we would have been getting a 700kbps connection. Our new service, NTT, costs about 45 dollars a month and offers speeds up to 100Mbps (though 25 Mbps is actually a more realistic expectation due to various factors). In other words, we're paying less for something that's at least 35 times faster.
I'm interested to see exactly how fast we can download. If it gets up to 100Mbps, we could download 3.5 gigabytes of data in as little as 5 minutes. That would take almost a full day with the other service. Most people don't care as much about that stuff, but for a tech geek like me, that's heavenly.
Up until now, we've been borrowing our neighbor's wireless internet connection. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to connect for about 3 days now. So, until May 8th (when our service is installed), we probably won't be able to keep in touch. I was really looking forward to hearing from people on my birthday, but that's probably not going to happen. Hopefully we'll at least get the slow wireless connection up and running again. We can at least do Skype with that. I'm going to write another post or two today and post them above this one.
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