Connected!
As soon as I had a date to move into my flat I started making arrangements for an Internet connection. My landlord very kindly came with me to the Česky Telecom office to do the talking, while I signed the forms. The landline was connected this morning, eight days after placing the order.

I picked up a DLS modem from the Telecom office yesterday (over the last week they changed their name and branding from Česky Telecom to Telefonica O2 to make things more entertaining).

I had been told that I would get an e-mail with the account information for the DSL, but no such e-mail came. This afternoon I decided to plug everything in and then call the O2 help line to try and find someone who spoke English and could tell me the configuration information which I needed.

To my surprise as soon as the laptop booted it was on the Internet! The router was pre-configured with the DSL information and it was set up as a DHCP server, so everything just worked!

Maybe the fact that I am so surprised marks me down as an old-timer, but like Paul Humphreys I can remember the pain which we used to have to go through in the "good" old days to get a working network connection.

I really missed not having a net connection available to me. I'm really pleased to be back in contact with the world again, and now that I can use VOIP for phone calls, Sue and I should save a fortune.