The False Hope

The False Hope

The slow net and the fast DC



On my first day at BIT, while shifting into my room, I noticed that square port, ever present, ever persistent. I asked the electrician about it, while he was fixing the tube light, he answered "That is not a telephone port, it's the LAN port, for internet." Impressed, as well as embarrassed, I was told that it will give me free-of-cost, super fast internet at 10mbps. It was needless to say that I thought my days of buying the annoyingly limited data packs are over. But I was wrong.



After I had moved in my room, that night I gave it a try. Setting up the LAN was easy, all the IPs were put in, the connection established, I was ready to go lose myself in the world of Facebook and online gaming, but when has living in BIT ever been so easy? I found out that we have a daily limit of 500mbs only. That was the first blow, so no playing 8-ball pool on Miniclip, no HD Youtube videos. But then came the speed, which was not exactly 10mpbs, took me a minute just to log in to Facebook. Life was playing a cruel joke on me, very cruel indeed, humor of the darkest kind. Giving one hope of his biggest happiness and then crashing it into a million zillion tiny pieces, it was torture seeing the blue loading bar slowly reach its destination on Google Chrome. My excitement was all but over, but that square port wanted to throw me in depression. I opened a new tab to check the show timings of The Wolverine, went to bookmyshow.com and thought to myself "this is going to take time". But it just took a millisecond to open the page, bit it wasn't what i expected. Oh the horror, the site was blocked, and was blocked under the category "Entertainment", which just baffled me. Out of all the rotten excuses they could have given, they give me this. How is entertainment so bad for us that you go the lengths of making it something students cannot access? It meant they they considered watching movies something wrong, in a nation where film stars are treated like Gods. After 15 minutes of slow social networking, i just wondered what is the use of this ugly square port, a disgrace to my wall which was otherwise filled with my favorite band and the cars i hoped to buy in future. It is practically worthless I was wrong again.

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The management had thrown at the students a snail-paced network on the promise of Internet, and the students had miraculously used it to make a local peer-to-peer LAN sharing hub, which was FAST, believe me when I am saying this, it was futuristic for me, even the torrents would not give me faster downloads. I am talking about DC, and this little beauty had everything, from every movie ever made to every TV show ever broadcasted, from every song ever sung to every game ever played, from every book ever written to... you get my point, it would take me forever to write about all of those things. It was an interconnected network where one could download all the entertainment from a computer somewhere else in the campus, in a matter of minutes. It was sharing on the biggest scale I had ever seen. Now i can watch every episode of every TV show , even the long forgotten movies were there. The collection was staggering. It made me fall in love with that square port, simply the most beautiful thing ever.



Now, after almost an year of using it, as I prepare for the end of my first year at BIT, the LAN network has played a very significant role, I can go on blaming the slow net it provides or I can continue to marvel at an awesome collection on the DC hub, I choose to do the second option, but will not, it will just make you jealous if you are not in BIT. My love affair with the LAN port is ever confusing, some times I just want to rip it off, some times I thank God for letting it be there in my life.

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