We’ve been having sporadic blackouts over the past three days. The power was out for several hours on Monday morning, and then again yesterday.
It could be just a coincidence, but when the power came back up, my high-speed Internet connection didn’t. Calls to Qwest (whose technical support is consistently excellent and customer-focused) confirmed that the problem was on their end. Service was restored in minutes on Monday, but it took all day yesterday – apparently a crucial piece of hardware in a server at the calling office failed and had to be swapped out.
So, for most of the workday yesterday, I had to use the free dial-up service that comes with my Qwest account. The experience was a serious blow to productivity, but at least (he says in an effort to find some silver lining in all this) it gave me an opportunity to test the dial-up features in Windows Vista.
From a usability point of view, setting up a dial-up connection in Vista was a complete home run. I plugged in my ancient modem, ran the Create New Connection, clicked the Connect To… link in Network Center, entered the dial-up access number and credentials, and was online in less than two minutes.
But damn, it was slow. I have a newfound appreciation for the frustration experienced by anyone who is stuck with dial-up in 2006.
Ed Bott 
Thanks for slumming it with the rest of us for a while…
Getting broadband even here in Australia can be a challenge for a lot of people, especially with the country being as large as the continental US with a population of only 20 million.
I’ve been waiting for my broadband now for almost six months since ordering it, and I am only a few kilometers from the center of a city of 130,000.