So it turns out, contrary to what I used to think, not all houses/apartments in Tokyo come with magical outlets connecting you to Internet at 100 Mbps. In fact, if you happen to live in what's called a "mansion type" (マンション) apartment that may be slightly old, you may need to wait for a whole month before you can get DSL/fiber hooked up. Of course once hooked up you could have a 100 Mbps connection but who is going to wait for a month? Since that would have basically meant living in hell for me, I had to find another solution and that solution came in the form of an HSDPA connection from EMobile. It basically has a SIM card in it just like a cellphone, and you get a speed of around 3.4Mbps. This is already faster than my connection back in the US (3 Mbps) but they also mentioned that before the end of the year the speed will go up to 14Mbps. Granted, it is more expensive than DSL (at around ￥６０００ per month) but I really did not have an option (well, I could have technically waited but not really, no). Getting it to work was easy with my Vaio that I got in Japan but the driver would not work with my tablet running XP Pro English when we tried it at the store (コジマ) (of course, once I got home and tried the new driver CD that came out of the box, it worked...).
Now I need to figure out how to get wireless networking, well, working with this connection. VAIO is running Vista in Japanese and that is not helping me with setting up internet connection sharing. I looked at some HSDPA wireless routers on the web but they all seem to work with a PCMCIA card which I do not have (what I have is connected to my laptop with USB) I think if I can get wireless internet connection sharing that would be the easiest/best. I will figure something out...
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