Internet 9571987, Jess…1?

During the membership interview here, they ask this question: “If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about Twin Oaks, what would you change?”

My answer, after a whole 3 weeks of living here, was “I’d make the internet way faster.”

And so began my long and tortured battle with the internet here. When I moved here, we got most of our internet through a satellite connection that we maxed out halfway through each month, and we ran our email through a locally hosted server with a dial-up connection. Dial-up. Email. In 2006. It was terrible. I still have fond memories of putting that particular server out of its misery.

Now, we have a T1 line that we run everything through, and our email is hosted off-site. So, instead of maxing out our connection and getting throttled into oblivion, we constantly overutilize our connection, which makes it hella slow anyway. And now, instead of not being able to reliably send and receive emails, I can’t reliably load the email webpage. So…improvement?

But soon…soon we will be upgrading to a fiber ethernet connection, which will give us over 6 times our current share of the tubes. I’ve been emailing back and forth with our provider trying to work out the details, and for some reason the community approved an absurd amount of money to be spent on this. So, maybe I’ll finally get to wave that magic wand?

Though, really, I expect it will take us about three weeks before we start overutilizing it again. And that overutilization will be all me, checking my email over and over again and laughing at how gloriously fast it is.