The Internet…. Here and There

The Internet… Its such a magnificent thing! I can not imagine living without it. Everything I do during the day revolves around using the internet in one way or another. May it be Skyping with my parents back home, or checking into a restaurant on Foursquare, or simply checking my Twitter feed and replying to chat messages in Line. Its amazing how much we can do on the web these days, and it makes our lives just a bit more colorful. But you know what annoys me more then anything? SLOW CONNECTION SPEED AND LOW BANDWIDTH!

I am from Latvia where ever since childhood we had unlimited internet with blazing fast speeds (like 4MB/s on torrents, 5 years ago). And then I arrive in Australia, where I have to live in home-stay, and guess what?!… I only got 1GB of internet usage PER MONTH….. I did not understand what these words meant when I heard them. How can this be possible? How will I survive? And there was no answer for it. There just wasn’t.

After spending the first month in utter depression, I somehow managed to befriend my landlord and she upped up my usage to 10GB per month. But still I was surviving on internet at INSEARCH and the Apple Store. Then I moved to urbanest where I got 30GB per month (and now have 40), but I still felt limited… Now that I kinda got used to this lifestyle I kinda stopped complaining, but I still remember the good old days back home when downloading an iOS update took 1 minute instead of 2 hours….

So a few days ago my parents upgraded the internet back home. So now instead of having a fiber optic cable run to our house and then a copper cable from the basement to our flat (we live in an apartment complex where there are like 200 flats in the building), we have a fiber optic cable running right through our flat and connected to a modem which then goes to my router and lovely PC. So now instead of paying Ls15 (~$30) per month for both cable TV, landline and internet my parents will have to pay Ls20 which is 34 Australian dollars per month. (Ls is the currency in Latvia – Latvian Lats) And you know what they are getting for this price? I don’t think you guys can even imagine…

Speed test in Sydney - AustraliaSpeedtest in Riga - Latvia

The question I ask myself now is: why did I come to Australia again? WHYYY?