Category: Everyday Life

Catching up with the modern world?

The other day, I got a sales call from NTT, and he said that because we already owned a telephone line, our NTT charges would be cheaper than the current ADSL plus telephone charges if we agreed to change to their fibre optic service. I usually can’t find much advantage in this kind of telephone sales call and just ignore them, but I like it when similar services from the same company become cheaper. I asked him to send me detailed materials and asked Chris about it, and then we thought it might be all right for us.

In the long run, it won’t be cheaper, but I who am not good at this kind of thing (fibre optics and internet so on) thought it wouldn’t be so bad, because the charges would become cheaper and the internet speed would also be faster. At the time of the call, I understood the construction was free for now, that our telephone number also wouldn’t change, and that everything wouldn’t be difficult.

However, we encountered some misunderstandings between the construction day and the sales telephone day.
(Because of my weak understanding about it? I who am bad at this kind of thing had to talk to the sales person on the phone.)
1 – They said the construction takes about thirty minutes. But actually it requires outside construction, too. So the whole construction takes about one and a half to two hours.
2 – Chris actually didn’t want to use an IP phone. But the fibre optic telephone line that uses a VoIP adapter is actually an IP phone.
3 – We thought we would have to connect one object. But we had to connect three pretty big objects, namely an ONU, a CTU, and a VoIP adapter. (So we had to buy a four-way extension cord before the construction.)
4 (additional) – This was not my misunderstanding, but NTT actually charges 4,200 yen for the fees related to the fibre optic telephone if we don’t want to change our telephone number.

We didn’t want to get a hole in our rented house’s wall!
So the construction guy found a small gap between the windows and we decided to use it for the wiring. It’s in my not-neat room that I really didn’t want to show to outside people. We had to ask them to run the wire through my room, so I had to give up.

Our three desktop Macs, one upstairs and two down, are a little old (as hardware and OS) so I heard that our internet connection couldn’t be as fast as my expectation. But I feel mine became a little bit faster. Chris says he’s having some trouble setting everything up, and it sounds like he has been suffering with it.

– YS, 16 February 2008

16 February 2008