Internet problem

[Barrykgerdes]

I lost my internet connection yesterday. What a calmity. I have lost it before but always had a backup system. However this time My back up was on loan to someone and I after suffering withdrawal symptoms for an hour I remembered I had not watched the last two Harry Potter movies so decided to run them. 6 hours later I finished the second installment.

Still no internet. I eventually rang Telstra and after some time on the phone they said I would need to ring another number. This I did away from my computer. After about another 10 minutes of testing they told me they could not find anything wrong. I went back to the modem and sure enough it was working again.

Barry

[supernova1965]

Good to have you back online Barry:thumbsup:

[gary]

Hi Barry,

You should think yourself lucky you only lose it for such a short period.

Here the copper lines are literally falling apart and we can lose all communication
for a week at a time up to three times a year.

Plus with no reliable mobile phone coverage in this part of the city, despite the fact
we are only 25km to the CBD as the crow flies, being without a fixed line means not only
no internet, but no voice communication either.

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi Gary

Yes we have a reasonable copper line but only about 1 in 2 of the local lines will handle ADSL we are about 4 KM from the exchange. It is not the first time I have lost the line. I have had many 2/3 hour drop outs and one 3 day. But I have a bigpond wireless that I use at Wiruna. It normally gets switched on as soon as I lose ADSL. I just pull the LAN cable out of the one and plug it into the other. It is almost a no break system.

We used to have a phone on the local exchange near you. Mt Kuringai 16
The local manual exchange was manned by the local general store man a Mr. Hamilton (if you could raise him). I learnt to use the phone there as Cub. I had to pass a message to pass a test. (circa 1944). There were about 8 lines on your side of the line. You probably have one of them :lol:

Barry

PS The message was "The plane will leave Essendon at 8 PM" short and sweet. I did not even know where Essendon was in those days.

[mithrandir]

One of my ADSL2+ routers has a USB port on the back I can plug my 3G modem into. It fails over as soon as the ADSL drops. It's a shame it won't sync on my line at the moment. The router that does sync doesn't have one of those ports.



Mt K is that much worse that Berowra? One of the guys at work who lives there "complains" when he can only get around 10Mbs out of his ADSL. You must be high on the list for the NBN.

[Exfso]

10Mbs, bluddy luxury!! dont know what he is complaining about. I only get around 6Mbs and I am 3.5km from the exchange.

[mithrandir]

I did put quotes around complains. :) I even complain I only get 13Mbs at about 2Km from the exchange. :D

Another workmate lives in Thornleigh about 3Km from the exchange - as the crow flies. It is well over 5Km the way the wires run. For ages Telstra would not let them have ADSL1 because they could not provide the minimal bandwidth.

He had to get ISDN to run his home office. ADSL2+'s better resilliance means they now have both ASDL and ISDN, but he'd say your 6Mbs was luxury.

[Barrykgerdes]

10Mb/s. (about 600KB/s) I just almost get that on a good day. Still its much better than dial up where I used to get 1.7-2.7 KB/s.

Barry

[Exfso]

I was getting 900kbps with bigpong until around 4pm in the arvo then it would drop to anywhere between 56kbps and 120kbps, this would remain until after midnight, obviously they did not have the bandwidth to handle the workload when people got home from work. They came up with all sorts of excuses so I got the telecommunications Ombudsman onto them, that sorted them. I am no longer on bigpong;), terminated my contract after only 3mths without any hassles. Now I am getting around 750-900kbps with my new/original provider with no bandwidth issues over the whole day, and operating out of the same exchange. So I reckon Bollocks to telstra and bigpong:mad2:

[multiweb]

Had a line with no dial tone couple of days ago. Corrosion. The rain seems to be the culprit. Lot of Broadband issues in NSW lately. Maybe weather related. Joiner boxes filling up. :question:

[gary]

Hi Barry,



We use a NextG connection when we travel within Australia.
The irony is that we can get a signal on the observing fields of Wiruna but not here
at our location in Sydney.



What you might have lacked in Victorian geography knowledge at the time as a Cub,
you certainly have made up for with such a good memory. :lol:

But when you consider the copper lines themselves, essentially nothing has changed
since those days. They were never designed to carry high-speed digital signals.

These days I tend to carry in my wallet some copper wire fragments that a
Telstra linesmen presented me with as representative of the six individual
breaks they found along the 1.2km of our line back to the Mt. Kuring-Gai exchange earlier this year.
As the technician made clear, the copper network was well beyond its use-by date
and he for one was looking forward to working on the new all-fiber network.

As part of after-dinner conversation, should anyone I encounter question the
necessity for the deprecation of the copper network, I use the copper fragments
as illustration whilst attempting to broaden their vision of the future. :lol:

[tlgerdes]

So you havent had to wait 3 days then for them to find and fix a fibre break for you yet? :lol::lol:

[gary]

Hi Trevor,

:lol:

That's an easy one for an engineer to answer.

Given the MTBF relatives of the PON versus the copper, I would rather wait
a much longer period between successive PON failures than the much
shorter period between successive copper failures.

[ballaratdragons]

I just tried 5 different Download/upload speed Test websites and they were all pretty close in results.

I average 15Mb download speed and 0.85Mb upload speed.

[Exfso]

Holy cow Ken, you must live next door to the exchange to get that sort of speed:eyepop:

[ballaratdragons]

G'day Pete, good to see you back online mate. Last I heard was in your email last week saying you might not have internet for weeks!

Anyway, that speed test above is done on this Lappy via wireless Wi-Fi connection to the router in my Dining Room, not by direct cable connection.
The exchange is at the other end of Snake Valley.

And sorry to say it but I am with your friend, Tel$tra BogPond :lol:

[gary]

Hi Andrew,

Not familiar with the situation at nearby Berowra but it has a population of around 4300
compared to Mt Kuring-Gai's 1500 and the populated area in Berowra is larger and over
more diverse terrain. So their mean distance back to the exchange is very likely
longer than for someone at Mount Kuring-Gai.

Our ADSL2+ connection tests at 14Mbs and about 0.8Mbs in the reverse direction.

However, that drops to zero whenever the copper line goes open circuit or
gets "battery" after rain. Which unfortunately is with monotonous regularity.
We have redundant pairs as backup but the copper cabling infrastructure here
is sadly on its last legs and has become a major problem for us. So we will be
glad to see it replaced as it proves expensive and time consuming each time it fails.

[Tandum]

Where I am in Brisbane we are on a RIM so it's ADSL1 only and therefore it's expensive. Max theoretical speed is 8Mbs but they limit it to 4Mbs so as not to swamp the fibre to the exchange from the RIM. Then they make me pay $30 odd a month for an unused phone on the wall just to sink the boot. Roll on the NBN ....

[brian nordstrom]

:sadeyes: 4mb/s Luxury! , we up here in Darwin average only 250 - 300kb/s and thats on a good day !
I agree tel$tra and bog pond HA! for what they charge its discraceful.:thumbsup:
I got a Vodafone connection just to try ,and $49 with 3 gig was I thought a deal , but it is terrible up here , 100kb/s ,,, :mad2:MAX !
If I left it on continuously for the whole month would not use the 3 gig!!
False advertising . :mad2:
So with no other choices , I am stuck with tel$tra!
Brian.

[Barrykgerdes]

Some interesting information has been posted on what appears to be the average internet speed.

While some claim full ADSL2 speeds of around 20Mb/s the average seems to be around 4Mb/s with half the users obviously getting much less.

At the moment ADSL2 delivered by landline is the most reliable because the user has exclusive use of the transmission media. The three parameters that limit the speed are 1. The bandwidth of your land line (inversly proportional to its length). 2. The capacity of the terminal in the exchange that drives the landline that has to share the available bandwidth between the users on line and 3. The external bottlenecks of capacity in the central terminals.

Wireless has the additional problems. The bandwidth of the transmitter (tower) has to be shared amongst all the users on line at a given time. and the necessity to re-transmit packets that do not arrive correctly. The higher the carrier frequency of the system the wider will be the bandwidth but as the frequency increases other problems of of the transmission media come into effect eg multi-path, reflections causing phase cancellation etc.

Fibre optics, The way we are going. At the moment it offers great capacity point to point but the bandwidth of the fibre optics is finite and with all the things that are proposed to be carried on a fibre optic network. I expect that sometime in the future it will also become saturated.

I think that smoke signals may be the way to go;):lol:
or how about the now almost forgotten technique of letter writing.:shrug:

Barry

[gary]

Hi Barry,

There are two truisms in the world of computing and communications -
a) Computers will never be fast enough to satisfy all requirements
and
b) You can never have enough bandwidth

:lol:
In the days of old, valuable spices were carried half way around the world
by spice ships.

These days, if information is the currency of the 21st Century, then bandwidth
is its medium and the world is demonstrating an unquenchable thirst for it.

An anecdote that comes to mind that helps illustrate this point appeared in the
opening paragraphs of an article I read in the April 2011 edition of
the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineer's Spectrum magazine (http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/cognitive-radio-and-game-theory).

The article's opening paragraphs begin -



So as we are starting to bump up against the Shannon Limit, that finite usable wireless
bandwidth spectrum is a valuable resource that we will want to free up as much
as possible so it can be used for what it is best used for, namely mobile applications.

Hertz for hertz, the prices the spectrum will be auctioned for in the future will
undoubtedly reach staggering values. An impressive trick for what is essentially
thin air.