Streaming savior

The calendar turned to April, and our fortunes changed.

But first some background.

For a long time -- years now -- we have been hearing about how the "NBN" was coming. "NBN" stands for Nationwide Broadband Network, and it meant an entire upgrade of the infrastructure for how we do internet here in Australia. I could get into the technical details but then I'd have to do a lot of googling, and besides, who cares.

It's been rolled out region by region, but not in the manner you might expect. Or I should say, not in the self-centered manner I might expect, as a city dweller. I kind of figured everyone in the most densely populated areas might get it first, and it would slowly roll out to the small country towns. It seems to have been the opposite. In fact, it started to be a joke that some areas had enjoyed the NBN for years, and a district like ours -- which actually has the world "Melbourne" in its name (North Melbourne) -- was still puttering along on inferior technology.

And boy was it inferior. I think the experience differed from household to household and provider to provider, but we have not been able to rely on our home internet at all lately. I've taken to using my phone's data whenever possible, made practicable by the fact that they randomly boosted my data from 10 GB/month to 40 GB/month without any additional cost to me. But that was no help when it came to our smart TV, where it's too tedious to change the internet setup depending on whether my phone is in range or not. And it's gotten worse -- perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not -- since they've done the necessary subterranean work, some of which was literally right outside our house.

But then we also heard that some people were not happy with their NBN, and that it actually represented a downgrade in service for them. This was a tad alarming. Now, you can't really go down from zero, so we didn't figure it would be a downgrade for us. But what if it was not demonstrably different? All our hopes and dreams, bundled up into these three little letters, might be shattered.

Our box came on Wednesday. It was supposed to just plug into the wall and be ready to go. But we had our trepidations, not only about the possible unchanged quality of our service, but also related to logistics. It requires an ordinary phone port to plug in, but our house is wired in such a way that we only have one of those way up in the kids' bedroom closet. And it involves a splitter, which is not supposed to be used in our NBN setup.

It all felt like too much of a hassle for me. This working from home is starting to exhaust me.

But my wife rolled up her sleeves, and last night, we flipped the switch.

Instant gratification.

All buffering stopped. All dropouts stopped. We watched the second episode of Tiger King (I know, we're behind) without a single hitch. It was a stark contrast to the other night, when we had to plow through the first episode on my computer, connected to my phone, and even then it had some issues.

Our grins could not have been wider.

I promptly connected my computer to the TV with an HDMI cable (I can't get to Kanopy without my computer) and streamed Roy Andersson's 2007 absurd film You, the Living, not for any particular reason other than that it was the movie I'd been planning to watch last night anyway. If the internet cooperated.

Well, now the internet was cooperating like a motherfucker.

Life was no longer a Roy Andersson film, an absurd war against technology waged by lunatics. We had returned to the land of the living.

It's probably too soon to write a post like this -- people who believe in jinxes would be going crazy right now.

But you gotta write while the iron's hot, and for the first time in years, we've got a hot iron in our house, internet-wise, metaphorically speaking.

All hail the NBN.