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It’s not just fast, it’s Fibre Optic!

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By Helen Lee Gray

Times, they are a changing.  Fibre optic is coming to Pera, yes our little village is going global and the sales people from Portugal Telecom (PT) have been round!   We are lucky, I think PT ran out of fibre optic cable and Pera is the end of the line!  (It’s the same (I hear) for the mains drains, anything above Pera is not connected).
In fact large towns like Figueira da Foz are without fibre optic because the law in Portugal has recently changed to allow any provider the opportunity to 'rent' the lines of PT.  So, what have PT done?  They've stopped putting in the lines of course!    A law which is suppose to benefit everyone,  gives consumers choice and adds some competition to the marketplace, has backfired a little and the result is a deadlock that ends up stalling progress!

So with a promise of a whopping 30mb speed guaranteed we signed up!  Now we wait for the change-over and for the obligatory moody PT engineer to come and drill another hole in our wall for another cable.  But, Peter assures me, it’ll all pay off, as our whole online experience will change.  O
ur ADSL is so very slow, results of the ‘speed’ test prove that.  Upload 'speed' 0.42mbs!



But in August it gets worse and even getting onto the internet is a problem as thousands of holiday-makers log in and use up what little speed there is facebooking their photos! 

But what does a high connection speed really mean?  Will I have to work faster just to keep up? Will the murder mysteries I watch on You Tube be clearer/better?  Will my Skype experience be ‘enhanced’? 

Having spent two hours only yesterday trying to download Instagram to my crap (and yes cheap) Android phone, only to realise that the bloody thing does ‘not support Google Play’ I feel that the whole mobile phone and tablet revolution has passed me by.  What the bloody hell is Google Play for a start?  

That’s the problem of ‘pay as you go’, of being a bit cheap and of living in rural Portugal I suppose…I just have let this whole thing happen and have remained faithful to my PC (I’m a PC and proud).  I’m a blogger, facebooker, pintrester and tweeter, but  mobile phones and tablets are a dead world to me.  Oh dear, is this what it is like to be a ‘silver surfer’ next I’ll be saying things like ‘what’s a browser’ and ‘opps, I think I have deleted the internet’. 

So high speed is coming….I just hope that I notice the difference and my life becomes enhanced!  Now if I can just get that mobile phone to stop searching for a WiFi connection...

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