Today is a slightly sad day, an end of an era of sorts - after 25 years it's time to move on to a new ISP.
It was Summer 1997 and this fresh-faced recent Uni graduate (Electronics @ York) needed an email address and web access in the hunt for his first job. In the final days of his Uni computer account being active he looked about the fledgling web and settled on Force9 as his ISP, itself in its first few months of existence. This was swiftly followed by a trip to a computer store in town to buy the latest technology - a 56k dial-up modem card.
And so began an adventure.
HTML, Perl, domains - it was all there for the learning. A lot of the early stuff was typed by hand in notepad. Hours and hours teaching myself stuff from books but mostly picking things up from code snippets and web pages that "real coders" had done before me. All uploaded to my Force9 webspace and CGI servers.
And all those hours online were being charged by the minute. On my BT phone account, not only was the dial-up number in my "friends and family" circle, it was my "BestFriend". I think I remember that right anyway. All to shave off fractions of a penny from the 1p per minute cost.
ADSL came around in 2005 giving a radical 10x speed boost and no dial-up charges, with small speed jumps coming every couple of years.
Then another kick in 2015 with fibre-to-the-cabinet and an engineer visit to fit the new socket and modem. Who could ever need faster speeds than 30-odd Mbps download, I thought. And so it was.... until I started working from home more often.
That 5Mbps upload speed was becoming a pain shifting files between home and work.
Shortly before the pandemic, pavements around the town started being dug up to lay thin purple pipe, but not in my area. CityFibre? Never heard of them.
But in late 2021 the thin purple pipe arrived in the street and the prospect of symmetrical 200Mbps was just too tempting, especially as it was cheaper than the out-of-contract price I was currently paying.
The new batch of required learning was how to "unhook" my hosted domain and all the email redirects - not to mention that I would need VOIP to replace the landline. That's all been another adventure. But that's now all done.
So, for now, while Plusnet are without fibre-to-the-premises, I have had to look elsewhere. The optical line has turned out to be stable and blisteringly fast, so I can now retire the backup Plusnet line I retained just in case.
Overall, Plusnet you've done me proud. (Sorry, had to get that in there somewhere.)
Let's try to gloss over the webmail data breach donkey's years ago and the recent email troubles. Sometimes stuff just happens I guess.
Thanks too to this forum's contributors and mods for your info and help.
Thanks for the ride Plusnet, I've enjoyed your company.
Maybe see you again some time.
Take care.
