Over the last few weeks my internet connection has been dropping on a regular basis. It has been more annoying than anything, although it has meant occasionally I have had to redo the odd post to DS.com. Last night it was getting beyond a joke, and I decided to give my ISP a call to see what could be done. I have done this before, and the people on the technical support help-desk told me that they 'cleaned the line' (or something similar), and after that it appears to have worked.

I spoke to the help-desk operator at Karoo who told me that since I got connected to broadband 5 or 6 years ago, the Fujitsu modem (which they supplied) is now outdated, drivers are no longer available (I knew this as well as I had a terrible job finding the right drivers for my new computer), and the Fujitsu modems are not capable of coping with connection speeds of more than 3 Mb/s. In addition to this he told me that internet connections are to be updated over the coming months, and as a result it is likely that I will need to get a new modem. Then when he looked at my connection, and log, he told me that my actual connection speed had been reduced, no doubt because I had previously reported poor connections.

I asked what could be done, and on the basis that I have been a customer for so many years would they consider supplying a complementary modem. Of course this is not what they normally do, however it turns out that there is a different package, which if I signed up for would allow me a faster connection, a cheaper bill, and they would supply me with a free Ethernet modem.

This seems a bit too good to be true, as not only will I get all those advantages, but not having an Ethernet modem was what hindered my installing Ubuntu Linux all those months ago.

I did a speed test before I got rid of the old modem and the are the results are alongside. As you can see my download speed is 2.15Mb/s. I'll try the test again when my connection is changed. Karoo say that where I live I should be capable of receiving downloads at 4.1Mb/s. Although at the moment 2.3Mb/s is quite adequate for everyday usage, such as i/net browsing, watching YouTube etc, and I thnk my microfilters may need replacing, We'll see how much improved the service is once everything is properly updated.