This weekend, for the first time ever, I bought myself some games to play online. I bought them online using steam and I'll have to admit that the whole process was relatively painless. The biggest issue is that I don't have media for the games now but you download them off the net. At this time I was up at KJ's and using his ADSL1 and downloaded Team Fortress 2 at about 550KB/s from the Internode mirror so didn't take too long. We played that online for a fair chunk of the evening until I went home.

Today, I decide I want to play Counter-Strike so I have to download the last 9% or whatever I hadn't got while I was KJ's. On my nice 'fast' ADSL2 service from Exetel I get 20KB/s. So it took a few hours. Here's the funny bit. It's not just a slow steam mirror. That's as fast as my internet is now apparently. Speed tests from an Exetel mirror get me some fancy godlike speeds of almost 33KB/s! As you could probably guess, popping online and simply playing the game is just too much for my dial-up, (oops. I mean.. really fast ADSL2+) service and I've had to give it away for the weekend.

It's not just rediculously SLOW data either. It's almost getting 50% packet loss too!

This has to be the worst internet connection I have used since living in rural Australia using Telstra dial-up. Ping times on game servers constantly jumps to over 800ms. For this amount of money each month, I could sticky-tape a few dial-up modems together and get better speeds. So I logged a fault with Exetel who email and then ring to tell me that, "A fault has been logged with our supplier for you, as soon as we receive an update we will contact you and inform you on what needs to be done."

No doubt I'll put an update on here as soon as I get fast enough net to download the images on my main page without killing MSN.
Maz