I finally have internet of my own. After almost three months of mooching off of someone else's unreliable wireless internet signal, I finally have my own. I signed up for 45mbps Yahoo! Broad Band (It's not really 45mbps unless you live right next door to the local NTT building. Since I'm 1.5km away, my speed is somewhere between 15 and 25mbps, still damn fast.) at the beginning of August, but since I didn't have a phone line, I to wait until NTT hooked it up. NTT is the former national telephone company that was privatized a few years ago. (But it was done so sort of like the US Postal Service or Amtrak, so it's not completely self reliant) Being a former nationalized company, it has many weird quirks, the biggest of which is that it costs about $740 to buy a phone line. This comes from an old system where they charged lots of money to give you a phone line so that they could use it build up their infrastructure. Now it is no longer needed, but if they were to stop charging this exorbitant price for new phone lines, they would also have to refund all the people that already own them, and that would bankrupt the company, so instead, you can rent a line, which, unless you plan on using it for more than 9 years, will save you money. (I think you can also buy phone lines second hand for quite a discount)
So they NTT guys came at 9am, and my modem was delivered at 11, and I had it set up by 11:15. The coolest thing about it is that I can also use it as an IP phone. You just plug a regular phone into the modem, and you can call anywhere in the world. Incidentally, calling the US at 2.5 cents a minute is cheaper than calling the person down the street (This is, again, thanks to NTTs high rates). I tried to call a few people tonight, but no one answered their phones, so I'll try later.
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