Faster is too slow

Technofetish warning: non-geeks should take evasive action now, I recommend this video starring the ineffable JonnyB (read the post first to get the background story).

Funny how one's perceptions change. I used a series of analog modems for over ten years, and found them fast enough for my purposes, until I got ISDN. Wow, so fast! I then used an ISDN modem for about three years, and found it fast enough for my purposes, until I finally got DSL hooked up the day before yesterday. Wow, so fast! How many months of happy use will I have before replacing DSL with ... whatever?

The claims made in the ads for DSL are true, except where they aren't. It is indeed blazingly fast - if you happen to be the only user that the website's server "out there" is handling. If you are one of 93748 simultaneous user at Apple's Software Update, then it just trickles along in third gear. (Still much faster than ISDN, but nowhere near the speed claims.)

A real disappointment with DSL is that uploading stuff happens at the same speed as ISDN. I'm a software developer, so I spend an awful amount of my online time uploading files (sending e-mail attachments amounts to the same thing). In fairness, that shouldn't really have surprised me, it is sold as "asynchronous DSL" and the fine print clearly states that uploading is slower than downloading. I hadn't expected the difference to be so drastic.

DSL has also pointed out a change in the meaning of size in computing. I bought my first gigabyte hard disk about eight years ago, and didn't manage to fill it before replacing the computer that it was in. The disk was a huge investment, I believe it cost half a Deutschmark per megabyte. Skip forward eight years: The DSL tariff I chose has a volume limit of 1 gigabyte per month. Think of that: I can pull an entire hard disk each month through this skinny black cable. And it costs next to nothing: seventeen Euros per month, one and a half cents per megabyte.

There are many different DSL tariffs on offer, I chose this one because I wanted to have no time limit, and a gigabyte per month seemed a reasonable amount: that's 32 megabytes per day, right? how could anyone possibly need more than that?

Well, my dears, I now know the answer to that question: in the 48 hours since DSL was installed, I have used up 261 megabytes (and yes, I also slept, ate, showered, read the New Yorker and did a day's work during that time).

Over a quarter of my monthly allowance in two days. Dear Lord, how can this be? (easy enough when you have three computers running in parallel, each downloading something or other). A gigabyte per month is clearly nowhere near enough.

The main surprise was on this side of the keyboard: my habits. Decades of expensive, slow connections have accustomed me to logging on and off several times per session: log on, grab a bunch of e-mail, log off, read and respond, log on, post the responses, log off. Well, DSL has no "off switch". It's permanently on, ticking away (except that with a pure volume tariff it doesn't even tick, the built-in accounting system can't tell me how much time I have used). It feels odd not having to click on "disconnect" at regular intervals. It feels very damned odd indeed to leave the house knowing that my wireless LAN is active and the DSL connection is still open, as though I were to walk away leaving the front door unlocked. I shall have to work on accepting this new paradigm.