My Experience of Internet Services in Brazil: W@y Internet

This service gave me a download speed of 512 kbps (kilobits per second). I later upgraded to 2 Mbps (megabits per second) in about 2012. This provided an upload speed of 512 kbps, which was a little slow for my re­quirements but certainly sufficed. The great feature of this service was that all list­ening ports were open [2]. Perhaps a few were shut, but none that affected any­thing I wanted to do. The IP (Internet Protocol) address was officially dynamic. How­ever, I never saw it change since around 2008. For all intents and purposes I had the fixed IP: 201.62.140.93. Instead of having to sign in to the service, user valid­a­tion was done automatically by identifying the MAC address of my TP-Link router. I have a suspicion that, a few years into the service, the technicians had simply de­ci­ded, for convenience, to tie my router's MAC address to this IP address, which was nice. The W@y TV tech­nicians, were polite and seemed competent and appropri­ately know­ledgeable. I got on well with them.

About a third of the way through my eleven years of using the W@y TV In­ter­net service, W@y TV was bought by a telecommunications company call­ed Oi. Consequently, from July 2008, my monthly bill for the service came from Oi, not W@y TV. Notwithstanding, I think that Oi, although the owner, left the old W@y TV people — at least from a technical point of view — to carry on their service as before. In fact Oi itself offered a competing service. The service provided by W@y TV was by coaxial cable, using a 573 MHz (megahertz) radio frequency carrier for download and a 32,496 kHz (kilo­hertz) carrier for upload. The Motorola Surfboard SB5101 [DOCSIS 2.0 comp­liant] cable mod­em had a top download speed of 38 Mbps, so I had plenty of speed upgrade potential, even if this actual top speed of 38 Mbps was not practical over the existing cables.

My home installation comprises 3 personal computers running Xubuntu Linux, each with a precisely-configured firewall to suit its intended use. The 3 computers are connected to a TP-Link router Model TL-WR741N, which also has a precisely-con­figured firewall with the minimum necessary and sufficient ports forwarded to one of the 3 computers on the LAN. The router is connected to the Internet via the Motorola SB5101 Surfboard cable modem.

I have subscribed to the W@y Internet service for 11 years. The service has worked perfectly with the installation shown above for at least 5 years. The firewall, shown in red on the cable immediately in front of each respective device, is of course really software, which is running inside the device itself.

Although retired, I continue to write articles on many topics which I make freely av­ailable via the Internet to whomsoever would wish to read them. All are on my web site, which is hosted on a server in the United States of America. I also make them available in PDF files, which I share via the eDonkey/Kademlia networks and Gnu­tella/G2 networks. The "fixed" IP address also allowed me to share them via a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, which I set up within my own computer.

These eDonkey/Kademlia, Gnutella/G2 and FTP servers within my computer con­sume hardly any bandwidth. On average, my colleagues and others around the world between them download from my computer about a dozen or less article files per day. This amounts to around 5 MB (megabytes) of data uploaded via my 512 kbps upload connection per day. Minuscule. My servers are thus more like trans­ponders than servers. They would certainly never create any traffic saturation prob­lem for the ISP.

How I wish that this tranquil state of affairs could have continued. Sadly, in a letter postmarked 14 July 2015 (followed by two shorter reminders), the ISP Oi, informed me that the old W@y TV & Internet service would cease on 18 August 2015. This, I was told, was because the technology was too old to be continued. Of course, like any service, W@y TV Internet had short periods of downtime. But never anything catastrophic. Its continuity of service was, on the whole, excellent. I had only 4 ser­vice call-outs in 10 years.

This gave me barely a month's notice to find a new provider. Furthermore, although W@y had moved the service to my "new" address on 20 December 2005 (almost 10 years ago) Oi sent all these letters to my old address. As a result, I did not re­ceive them until the beginning of August. I was fortunate to receive them at all. Oi sent no such letters to my present address, to which they correctly send their monthly bills. Thus I was left with barely two weeks to find another ISP.

© August 2004 to August 2015 Robert John Morton

[1] I was not the ISP's actual customer, that was somebody else, who subscribed to the service on my behalf. However, throughout this essay, for clarity of prose, the first person singular has been used to indicate either or both of us. The other per­son has no knowledge, involvement or responsibility regarding any of the content of this monograph essay.

[2] Within this essay, an open port is a TCP or UDP port number that is configured to accept unsolicited incoming IP packets. An open port in this sense is also known as a listening port.