The first time I had internet at home was back in 2000. I was a student in my final year living in a shared house. We were very lucky and had internet through the phone line ( I lived with a lot of tech loving boys ) but as we only had one connection we had to buy a massive, long cable and take it in turns to use. I remember vividly the cable stretching down or up the stairs. It seems so old fashioned now, but it was either that or go and work in the University library, which was a bit of a trek. We had no hope of watching anything on YouTube and pages took an age to load. I don’t think we realised then quite how much the internet would change our lives within a few short years. E-mail and internet phones were just a dream. Looking back it seems so old fashioned. I remember my father in law thought you had to reconnect to the internet to look at different pages as his internet was SO slow, which made us all giggle, but actually it was so slow sometimes you did have to reconnect. When I first started work ( as a programmer ) we didn’t have internet access as standard, it had to be requested if you needed it, can you imagine that now??
My first laptop after graduating didn’t even come with the capacity to connect wirelessly, we had to buy a special adaptor and having wireless capability was a real novelty. It was a world away from having the internet everywhere you go, as we do now.
I’ve definitely noticed how much easier it is to find free wifi recently, although on our recent holiday you had to pay for internet on the ferry which seemed a bit of a cheek when it cost so much to travel, although sometimes not having access to work e-mail is good thing as it means you have to switch off for a while.
High speed internet is hugely important in our house as both my husband and I work from home and can’t do much without the internet, we need it to be reliable and fast or we lose money. Business fibre broadband has been fantastic, and most definitely something we can’t manage without. We always check before going on holiday whether there is internet or not as usually we have to work in the evenings, the internet and quality of internet has become such an important factor in lots of decisions we make from which hotel to stay, how we travel, whether we pay extra for a lounge etc.
Do you have fast, reliable internet?
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