Warning: The following is another of those horrid posts about the mechanics of the internet. Not interesting at all, but in the same way that breathing isn’t interesting…

If hell is an offline existence, then surely purgatory is dialup internet access. I was weaned on 1Mbps+ in New York, and in Sweden I was ogling the 26 Mbps (!) service being introduced by Bostream, so when I saw my parents’ paltry setup here in Dublin I decided to get them up to speed, so to speak.

Ireland, the European technology darling of the 90s, would surely be drenched in broadband. Not so. I was told there was no broadband internet access available to our (posh) area in Dublin. Incredulous, I set out to prove the naysayers wrong, and thought I had scored an early victory when I found that the local cable company, NTL, had started broadband services just last month. I called them, expectantly, but they informed me that they were only experimenting, really, and no, our area wasn’t going to be serviced for a long while yet.

They did, however, offer a special kind of internet access that they would gladly install anywhere in Dublin. The salesman quoted the price a little sheepishly: 9800 a year for a 512kbps leased line. I actually said “Oh, that’s not too bad” before I realized he was talking in euros, not kroner. For that price, I would expect my emails to be delivered personally. No wonder NTL is not rushing to roll out cheap cable internet services.

DSL, then. No luck here either. Although the phone lines clearly suffice for the ISDN setup they support, they apparently don’t qualify for ADSL, the operator told us; either our phone lines are too old or we are too far from a switching station (here in the center of Dublin), though which of these two possible reasons it might be the operator wouldn’t tell. Could we get a new phone line? We could, but she couldn’t tell us if that new line would qualify until we got it. Fat chance, then.

Is it really possible nobody laid any decent cable in Dublin, through which the internet might flow unfettered to the masses? Apparently so, and I am not the only one to notice. It’s actually cause for a political movement here. Might there then be a push for free and public wireless access, á la what’s being built in the East Village? Well, there is a nascent group doing noble work here, yet Dublin is too diffuse and the transmitters too weak to blanket the area. But their nodemap did put me in touch with people who knew of a local company offering residential wireless internet access.

Bingo. They have a transmitter some 800 meters from the house, and an (obligatory) line-of-sight survey confirmed we get a good strong signal from it. Today they came and installed the antenna, and I’ve been in broadband heaven for hours now. Most surprising is the strong upload capacity: Earlier, I was video iChatting with Felix in New York. Nice perk: a fixed IP address!

Watch this space. I have a huge backblog to inflict on you in the next few days.