So Slow

Yesterday I was over at a customers house doing some work installing a video cam for them. They wanted to use the cam with MSN or Windows Live so they could set up video chats with their extended family.

This was fine and I felt probably about a 30-60 minute task. Little did I realize that they were still on dial up. So of course I had to download Windows Live for them prior to setting up the cam. Now this is not a large program as it is only 17.2 mb in size.

Prior to departing for the customer's house, I had downloaded the Windows Live on my laptop to ensure I knew what to do at the other end. As I said it is a 17.2 mb download which took about 70 seconds at my house. However, with dial up, this same 70 seconds took 2 1/2 hours to download. Just watching the download creep down was just so painful.

I actually was going to zip home a couple times, burn it on to CD and then head back to the customers. However, I used my time to update a few other programs on the computer and get everything ready for the vid cam.

After what seemed like hours (well yes I guess it was 2 1/2 hours), the file downloaded and I got the Live up and running. Then I set up the audio and video and all was working just fine. The only problem was that the customer had never used MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Live or any chat type program. So of course I had to do a quick tutorial in the opening/using of the program.

After I figured the customer had it down pat, I headed for home with instructions that I'd give them a phone call back and we could then go for a trial run from my house. Once home I fired up the laptop (which zooms right along after the recent format/reinstall), opened up Live and then made my phone call.

Now you have to remember the customer used their phone for their internet, so I had to wait a few seconds for them to hang up the phone, fire up the dial up internet and get logged on. I was impressed that within a minute or so the customer was online in Live. I immediately sent out a text message to show that we were both up and running and then advised it was time to go for the audio/video.

Once again, I was impressed with the customer as they had the camera right up and we had a quick video chat to ensure all was fine. There was just a bit of adjustment with the camera to get the picture centered, but other than that all was just fine. With that all taken care of, we closed out and I watched to ensure the customer had followed the instructions to close out Live by actually 'exiting' and not just closing down to the 'task bar'. This was all done, so I was a happy instructor for the day.

As I sat back and thought about how things went for the day, the dial up slowness certainly made me thankful for a high speed availability. But then I thought back to when I first started this 'computing' thing back in the early to mid 90's. At that time SaskTel wasn't even in the internet field. I used Prodigy as my internet ISP. My closest access was Edmonton so of course I had to use long distance to sign onto my account. If I remember correctly I normally only used the 'net' at night after midnight when the cheaper phone rates were in effect. It cost approximately $10.00 per hour of use. Let me tell you, you didn't do a lot of sitting around on the 'net' playing games etc. You got on to the 'net', found what you were looking for and signed off.

Oh yah, I had a blazing fast modem at the time of my Prodigy use. It was a 2.4 kbs dial up modem. Yup the top speed was 2.4 kilobits per second. Now a days of course the dial up modems run at 56 kbs with Flex or V90 protocols, but most setups hardly get quite that high. Case in point is the customer from yesterday computer dial up was running at 45.2 kbs. That still is a long way from 2.4.


Like the old saying 'We have come a long way'.