Some excuses for getting faster DSL... from sonic.net

For the past N years, our DSL has promised "Up to 1.5mbps Download" speed. Our isp is sonic.net, located in Santa Rosa, and we've been using their Express-S (static IP). I kept telling myself I'd host a website from my house, but with flickr/picasa offering huge amounts of storage for free, besides not wanting to have to watch carefully for intrusions on my boxen, I never got a Round Tuit.

The lovely Carol has been wanting to watch Castle online, but our 2006 powerbooks don't cut it. The mac mini is in the den, and we're not moving that to the living room. I'm thinking roku. This $100 box will forestall having cable tv, even if hulu plus is $10/month oh, that's $8/month now. Yow!

Oh, back to DSL. I discovered that the 3-6Mbit/sec download DSL option (with dynamic IP address) would cost me less than I've been paying for "up to 1.5Mbit/sec download" with static IP. I put the order in Sunday I think, and they said it would be complete today.

Well, I woke up this morning, fired up my computer, and... no internet. H'm... Then I remembered -- dynamic IP address day today! So I reconfigured my router for DHCP. Still couldn't ping my nameservers, but after a few minutes we were good. Then I tried downloading Scotty's sermon from last weekend and it came in at over 600 kbytes/second -- that's nearly 5Mbits/sec. Oh yeah!

Next I tried connecting to the office. I'm taking the day off today, so I thought I'd connect up and put up my "vacation" notice. BOY was the connection faster! Since I connect to the office using vnc, the higher speed gives me a much better work-at-home experience.

If you're thinking of getting DSL and you live in this area, I have to say I really like sonic.net -- especially if you want to login to the server and do stuff, like edit your .procmailrc. They have NetApp filers with two nightly snapshots, there's a backup service you can use, etc. And I love their support crew. I don't get any kind of referral bonus unless you mention my name or something when you call them.