Internet on the go

And even if you aren't on the go, it's pretty much the only way to obtain internet access RIGHT now.

You see, we've been sitting in a virtual queue over at the Etisalat headquarters for nearly three weeks now, with nary a word as to when we might expect broadband installation at home.  The nice surprise was that we were able to piggyback off of one of our neighbours (yes, people really do have unprotected wireless networks...still).  That lasted about a week.

Then nothing.

So being the can-do people that we are, we sprinted over to the Etisalat kiosk at Madinat Zayed Shopping Centre a few evenings ago and picked up a USB 2.0 high speed modem, model number MF633.  Don't bother looking for it on the Etisalat site, because it doesn't appear to be there.

The device, which I like to call "the dingleberry," is - wonder of wonders - compatible with both Windows and Mac, and comes with its own little somewhat-intuitive-but-not-really software.  I think it costs about 499 Dhs, but I'm not sure because we can't find the receipt in the sea of confusion that has become our lives over the past few days.

You're probably wondering if there are other costs involved.  Well, of course there are.  Like the SIM card (known as "Wasel" in EtisalatSpeak -- kinda funny when you consider we're in the land of non-drinkers).  Wasel probably means something like maybeit'llworkandmaybeitwon'tbutweguaranteeyou'llhaveanimpossibletimefiguringitout.  But I digress.

The SIM card itself costs about 175 Dhs, and then you have to load it up with money.  Hint:  load it with 460 Dhs and be sure to dial the 125 number from it (you'll have to put it in another mobile phone for this to work) and subscribe to the monthly plan of 10 gig.  If you don't do this, you'll be on the default pay-as-you-go plan, which effectively means your internet access will cost you one million dollars per byte.

The broadband service packages are (sort of) described here.

I have to say that after 72 hours of kvetching and worrying, the dingleberry works pretty well (rather in the same way that a gimp turtle does well in the 500-metre dash).  I've run some speed tests (see www.speedtest.net) and -- are you sitting down? --

I get download speeds of 1.88 Mbps (that's megabits per second).

Holy slow as molasses in January, Batman!  Well, the fact is that 1.88 is a lot better than the .88 I was getting yesterday.

The biggest coup of the day, however, was figuring out how to get internet access to both of our laptops simultaneously.  Here's what I did (ok, I'm going to omit the part about my running an applescript without really knowing what I was doing and thereby screwing up my plist files so that nothing network or internet-related worked):

1.  Trashed my network-related plist files and rebooted (this rebuilt the system files).

2.  Got out the Apple Airport Extreme wireless router that I brought along in my carry-on baggage.

3.  Set up internet sharing on my laptop, using a password-protected local address for other computers using Airport.

4.  Turned on Airport on my husband's laptop and selected my local host.

5.  Entered the password.

I'd like to say this was pure genius, but it's much more accurate to say it was the result of brute force.