McFilter

The Good and Bad of Italian Broadband

I'm slowly feeling more at home here in Torino as we ease our way into la vita d'Italiana. Getting Internet access in the apartment has been a big help as it means we're less isolated from everyone we know, and also meant access to things to read.

Our boxes of books were one of the first casualties in the great it-won't-all-fit-in-the-car purge, and it hadn't taken me long to read the latest issue of evo and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which were the only reading material to make it with us.

On Tuesday afternoon, two nice men from FastWeb visited and spent four hours running a cable from the basement of our block into the apartment. When they left, we had a new phone number and a box on the wall with three ethernet sockets for Internet access.

As we're in the city, we can get the latest, hi-tech solution for our net access. It's pretty cool to have a fibre-optic cable running all the way into the apartment, with only the last few metres of networking done over copper (or a combination of copper and thin-air...).

It also means that we get a synchronous 10Mbps connection. None of this really high download speed but paltry upload channel like we had with NTL Virgin Media back in Cambridge. In reality, according to the speedtest.net, we're getting about 4.5MBps downstream and 2.3Mbps up. That should at least make things like Skype and Bittorrent run better.

The downside of FastWeb is that you don't get given a proper IP address. Most of the time you don't notice, but it means that there's no easy way for me to connect to my home network when I'm not in the house, and I had to spend the first evening reconfiguring my email server before I could receive anything.

It's good to be back online though.

Tags: fastweb broadband torino turin