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Griffiths / Speed comes to the slopes

INTERNET at my place on the O’Connor slopes has been touch and go for the last year.

If no-one else is in the house and the neighbourhood kids have gone to bed, then it’s been fine.

But when the stars are inauspiciously aligned it’s a downright dog.

John Griffiths.
John Griffiths.

To make matters worse, in this day and age when everyone’s got four or five devices hanging off the network, and they’re all automatically upgrading themselves, it can be a delicate business tracking down who is hogging all the capacity and making “Game of Thrones” buffer, or the rugby downsample to blurry lumps.

For years I’d lived a smidge closer to the Braddon telephone exchange and ADSL2 over the old copper wire had worked pretty well.

But crossing Macarthur Avenue had us down to 2Mbps (barely adequate) dropping down on a hot day to borderline unusable speeds, where tethering to my mobile phone brought better speeds.

With the NBN apparently off in the never never for the Bolsheviks of the Inner North, there didn’t appear to be a solution on the horizon.

And then the ads started appearing for VDSL.

Do you remember the old Transact network? Kate Carnell’s white elephant of a fibre network that was doomed by a change of government and unfortunate shifts in the world technology landscape.

It was unceremoniously flogged to the internet service provider iiNet at a knockdown price a few years ago.

At the time it was slower, fiddlier and more expensive than simply running ADSL over the copper phone network.

But since acquiring it, iiNet (since gobbled up by TPG) has upgraded the old network.

I was wary. VDSL (very-high-bit-rate digital subscriber line) is technically worse than ADSL at coping with distance from an exchange. On the other hand this network doesn’t use the old copper wire telephone exchanges in the same way.

I asked around and everyone who had tried it said it was a great improvement.

So I called iiNet. A nice person set a date when an installer would come to the house.

On the appointed day my phone rang, the installer was half an hour away. I toddled home. The nice installation man slung a new cable from the power pole to house, crawled around under the house for a while, drove off down the road to fiddle with a box, drove back and installed a new VDSL wifi modem.

Bang, there it was.

Speed testing showed that we’d gone from around 2Mbps (with fair skies and a following wind) to 40Mbps.

In the last week it’s been completely and unremarkably functional, which is how I like my technology.

So if you’re within the network footprint, out of contract with your ISP, or already with iiNet, and unhappy with your internet speeds I recommend it.

On the other hand, it’s worth pausing to consider how far we’ve come.

When I first ventured online in 1998 it was with a 32Kbps dialup modem.

With that I could do… well mostly what I do with it now. My internet speed is now literally 100,000 per cent better than it was 20 years ago.

The improvement has mostly gone to streaming video, the convenience of multiple devices and pervasive monitoring software installed into pretty much every web page you look at.

It seems like a lot of effort from our society for not a great deal of benefit.

But would I go back to 32Kpbs? How about 2Mbps?

Not willingly.

 

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2 Responses to Griffiths / Speed comes to the slopes

bluedog says: 17 February 2016 at 12:05 pm

Yes. It’s freaking awesome, isn’t it. I’m in the same boat and it makes me as happy as finding a double-yolker egg – a little bit of unexpected joy in my day!

Reply
Frank Assessment says: 17 February 2016 at 8:25 pm

The network capability existed to do this for all Canberrans from 2000 on. It was only a hopeless bunch of clowns in charge of pricing and a pathetic approach to customer service that meant transact didn’t create for itself a nice monopoly in town that would have returned our investment manyfold. We could have absolutely lead the world.

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