In preparation for this cruise I put
$50 into my Telstra wireless internet dongle, which gives me internet
access whenever I am in range of a Telstra cell phone tower. The $50
would give me 3 Gb of data, which seemed ample for 3 weeks of email
management, reading of newspapers, and getting weather reports.
On the 3rd day of the cruise
the internet service stopped. Stephen was able to check my account
and told me that we had used a whopping 2.9 Gb of data in one day. I
spoke with Telstra support who concluded that the data had been
mysteriously consumed because I had left the dongle connected for
hours when not using the system. I was in no position to defend this
and was forced to accept the advice, pending a personal visit to a
Telstra office to get more information.
Brenda then put another $30 into the
dongle and were were very, very careful to disconnect immediately
after finishing our internet work. The dongle ran out of money on
the 3rd day. Telstra confirmed that in that morning's 42
minute session in which we had done email work and I had read two
newspaper articles we had consumed 515 Mb of data. Telstra could not
give me information on what IP numbers were involved in this huge
amount of data consumption.
That night I thought of the Avast!
antivirus software and
sure enough during that 42 minute session Avast! had upgraded
its dictionary with a 165 Mb download. This means that in future I
will have to shut down antivirus protection when using the dongle,
but that 165 Mb does not explain everything. I have done full
systems scans with up to date Avast! and Malawarebytes
and there appear to be no infections in the computer.
The result is that there will be no
more internet from Pachuca for the rest of this cruise. I am writing
these blog updates “off line” as word documents and will upload
them and associated photos after our return to Fremantle.
No comments:
Post a Comment