Extreme teleworking: A Reg hack reports from the internet's frontier

What's the traffic sign for "The internet stops here" ?

Iberbanda? Eeee, thee's don't know thee's born!

Casa Pete 2 is 8km from the nearest Iberbanda coverage. However for only a few more Euros per month, we get an HSPDA connection at a "screaming" 3.6MBit/s - at least that's what it dice on the lata - though to be fair the speed is usually pretty good. The only proviso being that you hold your mobile phone in exactly the right orientation, while standing on the roof.

As soon as the aforementioned signage gets moved closed to our place, sticks will be upped and another telecommuter will be on the plane to rural Spain.

I suspect that Spain and a lot of other countries could make some serious improvements to their current accounts by attracting more knowledge workers from the rich, rainy north of europe to the poor, sunny (though we suffer the same extremes of weather, that Lester describes: it's not always sunny in inland Spain, and when it is, it's bloody hot) south. However that would need a fair bit of improvement to the connectivity. Though doing that work would provide a fair few jobs, too.

The cold cottage

I'm thinking thermal rendering, double glazing (tastefully done of course) and loft insulation. I'm also thinking thermal underwear, easily ordered on e-bay.

If you get round to it, please post the pictures for us (but not of the thermal underwear; no, no).

It is nice to see that you have overcome some of your problems. I've been here in the Pyrenees (French) for 20 years and 5 years ago we got ADSL in the village. Before that happened France Telecom re cabled the village when they were doing the Perpignan to Andorra fibre link. We had hoped they would bring fibre to the village as well but no luck so I'm still on the end of 6.5 km of copper but at least we don't get the drop outs when the wind blows or it rains as it did on dialup.

If your house is anything like mine the half metre thick walls should be an advantage both in keeping the inside cool in summer and warm in winter. The biggest problem I found was keeping the cold gales out in winter, that necessitated some work on the windows and doors but now I only need heating on for a max of two months a year. I do have a fire that allows for pushing warm air round the place through ducting though.

I do envy you though with your garden - I don't have one being almost at the top of the village which flows up the side if the hill.

Been there wearing the tee for 10 years now. We have two lines into our house in a rural country abroad for redundancy, mobile phone tarrif's with 3g, uk number redirection, strong token vpn's etc, for heating we laid underfloor heating and fitted a big automatic wood furnace with funky inverted fire and auto log feed capability and big water tanks, and then the stone heat intertia works great FOR you as the house takes days to cool down but you can still buy your logs from the local farmers to help the community. A poxy wood burner in one little room might seem like utopia, but it isn't.

I get up, set a fire off, or resurrect the remains of last night's in mid winter when we burn continually, do some conf calls + work, then cut and throw more logs in mid day (at 60Kw/hr output it runs 4 hours without attention), then back into the meelee. It's a great contrast and helps focus me for the afternoon and probably a lot better for me physically than nipping a gym for 30 mins on my way home. I'm also happy to work out of hours to get things done despite the usual prof day rates, since I'm here anyway and no horrid commute to deal with its nothing to walk in the office and just tweak some processes or check a cron job is working properly.

And the worlds a small place, in two hours I can be landing at various airports in the UK clutching my suit bag and snagging a hire car if circumstances dictate.

Plus we have enough space to do what we like, one of the outbuildings houses what in effect is a mini dc with two 47U racks full of kit to experiment with, a backup genny + ups etc. Another outbuilding has the office in it separate from the house with kvm over ip to the lab etc. Most of my co-workers don't even realize I'm a homeworker hence the posting anon.

I think the arrangement suits me, and my end clients. The only downside is you have to be incredibly disciplined to working without oversight, and your boss has to have faith in your commitment to that. Apart from you Lester, since your a journo :)

Cool as a bag of cool things

I admire your bravery and your determination to overcome the joy of prehistoric buildings, altitude and technology. And I especially like reading about it :)

Lucky Guy!

I live a few miles north of Watford and get a maximum 430kb/s broadband over BT copper.