“Books, games, bras and missiles! All at your fingertips, ready to be downloaded!” Honestly, I have not downloaded any bras and missiles yet.

I am consolidating and expanding my Internet access. I had four different mobile broadbands from two different suppliers. The plan is to go to one mobile broadband from each plus one DSL landline broadband. It’s a low-capacity broadband, at 5 MB it is barely worthy to be called broadband by modern standards, but that’s fine with me. The main point is that there is no upper limit of n GB use per month, as there is on mobile broadband.

In my previous rented home, I had fiberoptic broadband, which was a huge overkill. But because I had rented the place for 5 years, it was actually quite affordable – it required a large initial cost to get the fiber to the small house by the riverside, but it was cheap from then on. Of course, the house was sold from out under me after a year and a half, so I decided to rely on wireless broadband for a while. This DSL broadband is a bit of a compromise. It cost nothing extra to start using, and I should be able to take it with me if I move to any house that has had copper-cable telephone at some time in the past. This was common until 20 years ago or less, so most homes fall in this category.

The DSL needs a special broadband modem. It comes with a wireless router built-in, so that’s nice since the phone contact is not in my home office. The modem is sent by mail, but the post office opens after I have gone to work and closes before I go home, except on Saturdays. Not a big deal, the line will for some obscure reason not be enabled until the 23d this month. I am pretty sure they just need to flip a switch, but perhaps this makes them feel important or something. I’ve made do with mobile broadband for more than a year and a half, so I can live with that for a couple more weeks.

Only after I ordered the DSL did I find out that one of my wireless broadbands actually has unlimited 3G, there is no n GB per month upper limit. (I have another with 8 and one with 5, I think – it varies.) Of course this was the one I used the least. I have now set it up as the default Internet connection for my home PC. So, it turns out I did not really need to buy anything new to have unlimited Internet… but at least I will now have 3 different sources of broadband, so I’m unlikely to get another 2-week vacation from the Net like I did back when I had only DSL back in the original (and best) Chaos Node, when Telenor threw the wrong switch and their helpdesk couldn’t find out what was wrong.

Anyway, I am celebrating my unlimited Internet by downloading and uploading more freely than usual. I’ve downloaded the new Neverwinter MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game). It is distributed via BitTorrent, a file sharing technology more famous for illegal copying, but which also is used for legitimate purposes like this (it is free to download and free to play, they get their income from selling various in-game perks and decorations.) So I’ve uploaded a few gigabytes of that.

But really, the Internet is too big for me to have it all running through my home, much less my mind.