Coming Home To Fast Broadband

2009 has been designated Homecoming year in Scotland.  Scots living abroad, those of Scottish descent, and those who simply love Scotland have been cordially invited to the celebrations that centre around the 250th anniversary of the birth of Rabbie Burns.  So it’s quite fitting that I find myself writing this in my new home in the Scottish Borders with the rain running down the outside of the office window.  The joys of a Scottish summer!

I’ve spent the last two weeks moving boxes from there to here and unpacking them and sorting out all the things you need to sort out when you move house.  Council tax, electricity, gas, what day the bins get emptied and so on.  And of course top of my list was getting broadband.

I’ve not had the best experiences of broadband providers to date and so wanted to get it right this time.  A fellow domainer, Sean Flynn, recommended Fast.co.uk and it turns out that the Managing Director is an old acquaintance of mine, Mark Baker.  Fast is part of the Dark Group and a few years ago it ran a public facing domain catching service that helped individuals like me secure domain names.  In fact, just a few months after catching the domain name fast.co.uk for Dark itself, I received an email from Mark to say that they had successfully registered entrepreneur.co.uk on my behalf.

So, partly as thanks for services rendered previously and partly because I liked what I saw on their website, I’ve signed up with Fast for my broadband.  Not the cheapest of options, but this is one area where you definitely get what you pay for. Crucially for me they offer a fast broadband service with no speed drops at peak times (and there have been times when other broadband providers have dropped their speed to virtually zero when I’ve been trying to work).  What’s more, it’s a rolling monthly contract after initial a three month period, so if I’m not happy after those three months I can jump ship.

I’ve had a few problems this end with my router set-up, but other than that so far so good.  Very good in fact.

Those two weeks of moving things from there to here mean I’m a bit behind with my usual “Summer holiday” site maintenance, not to mention my planning for the rest of the year, but I’m making headway there too.  I’m really hoping for a big run up to Christmas and better than before earnings from my websites so a lot of hard graft and exciting times lie ahead.  I don’t expect to launch any new sites this year (famous last words?), but do have plans to revive one or two that have lost their way over the course of the last year or so.

Anyway, back to unpacking boxes.