Wireless whinges

AndyC said :

I know I have less to complain about than most of the posts above, but my connection sucks. I live in the middle of Phillip – I can spit on the Canberra Hospital from my balcony. The best I can do on ADSL 2 (on a good day) is somewhere around 4MB/s…pretty poor if you ask me.

I also know a gentleman who just moved to Chifely – he’s been told he can’t get ADSL 2 at all as he is too far from the Deakin Exchange where his phone line terminates.

Plug your address into http://www.adsl2exchanges.com.au/addresslookupstart.php and see what you should be theoretically capable of
It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s never been too far off the mark for me

If the site for says that you should be able to get substantially quicker, the problem *may* be with the wiring in your house, which is your responsibility to hire someone to fix.

My house should do around 8mbit according to the site, but I only got 4/0.5 mbit when I moved in. Cutting an extension cable that appeared to be a dodge job by a previous owner, got my download speed up to 6mbit and improved my upload speed to 1mbit. Hiring someone to re-wire the place properly would probably get me the rest of my missing speed.

All pretty crazy for a ‘planned’ city if you ask me..

Mr Griffin never designed a high speed internet network as part of the Canberra master plan unfortunately

We have a $60 per month Virgin Broadband wireless setup. We have an uncapped 4gb limit per month (uncapped meaning that they allow us a supposed line speed of 512 kbps until we hit our 4Gb limit). Once we hit our 4Gb limit they supposedly choke our line speed down to 128kbps and it costs us nothing extra to continue using the net.

The funny thing is that even on the supposed line speed of 512kpbs, i’ve only ever experienced around 130 – 140 KB/s download speed around 5 or 6 times in the 2 years we’ve been with VB wireless(except for a freak ocurrance which i’ll explain below). Our normal uncapped download speed is around 30 – 40 KB/s.

Once we’ve hit our 4Gb limit and our line speed is supposedly capped to 128kbps, our download speed sits at around 13 – 18 KB/s. Correct me if i’m wrong, but that’s not much better than dial up.

The freak occurrence :

Recently after our 2 year contract had ended, we got actual download speeds of up to 775KB/s for a period of 24 hours. I should mention that i was using orbit downloader to download You tube vids at the time (we don’t normally have speeds fast enough to stream them). Obviously we’ve never seen these speeds again but i would like to know exactly what happened in order for them to have been made available to us for that amazing 24 hours.

And yeah – we live in Gungahlin

We’ve got Transact fixed line in Chifley and it’s been great. I regularly make Skype calls – domestic and international – and it’s pretty good.

I’ve also got 3 wireless broadband at my work in the city. Johnboy personally tested out the space for access before I moved in, which I appreciated 🙂 It’s good for email and web browsing, but start using it for Skype calls and the service is inconsistent – lots of calls get static on the line etc. Fixed line would probably be better for my heavy use.

Oh, let me count the ways with Optus being unacceptable. Right now I’m in downtown Lyneham and I’ve got about half a bar (steady) of GPRS (i.e. about dial-up speed) when I should have a rampant 7.2MBs (yeah, right). They’re releasing me from my contract as one of the places I really need access is in a part of NSW where it’s even less coverage than this, but I’ve been dragging my feet on getting Telstra Bigpond WiFi instead. I’ll pay a premium for it, but at least I’ve confirmed that the connection in rural NSW where I need it is consistent and working.

I know I have less to complain about than most of the posts above, but my connection sucks. I live in the middle of Phillip – I can spit on the Canberra Hospital from my balcony. The best I can do on ADSL 2 (on a good day) is somewhere around 4MB/s…pretty poor if you ask me.

I also know a gentleman who just moved to Chifely – he’s been told he can’t get ADSL 2 at all as he is too far from the Deakin Exchange where his phone line terminates.

All pretty crazy for a ‘planned’ city if you ask me..

4G mobile is not the same thing as WiMax, though it has goals of addressing the capacity problems, though I imagine roaming, bursty internet usage like what the iPhone or Android would use would be the design priority rather than fixed broadband replacement.

I think Intel was really trying to push to get WiMax off the ground here via Unwired in Aus a few years ago (I could find a news article from 2005 confirming it), and I think that it was going to be used for the Opel roll out before it got canned, and I think they are looking at using it as part of the NBN for the 10% of the population that won’t get fiber.

The York Peninsula in SA has been using WiMax since last year http://news.smh.com.au/business/sas-yorke-peninsula-gets-broadband-20080819-3y1j.html – apparently wiring up the area was infeasible. I’m not sure about how it’s actually turned out.

WiMax. Is this what is also called 4G mobile?

junkett said :

Is wireless any good around the rest of Oz? I’m happy enough at home with ADSL1 (which apparently won’t be upgraded down south to ADSL2 any time soon anyway) but have thought about buying a prepaid USB wireless gadget for trips around the country. That would save me trying to dial in – but will obviously be a moot point if wireless internet is a pipe dream Oz wide.

I think if you can get coverage in less populated areas it shouldn’t be too bad. The slowness issue is mostly to do with congestion, which rural areas shouldn’t have an issue with.

But, it will never be a reliable technology. You might find it works great one day, then without you changing anything you might get disconnected every 10 mins due to drop outs.

Gungahlin Al – were those “raving about the wonders of wireless” proposing a purpose built wireless network such as WiMax?
I believe that technology has much more bandwidth available per cell and thus can handle more simultaneous users than 3G mobile phone networks

As more and more people start using 3G services, the worse it will get.

Fiona said :

My Virgin connection was woeful – not sure of the speed, it was the not connecting all the ime that sucked. The modem did die a week out from the end of contract, so the dodgey modem may have played a part.

I’ve got a little stick modem now from Crazy Johns which is doing the job. Not super fast of course.

Virgin wireless is owned by Optus and is so appalling that there aren’t enough nasty words in the dictionary to describe it appropriately. Their *ahem* “customer service” was also so bad as to be worse than completely non-existent.

I went to the telecommunications ombudsman about Virgin mobile and was let out of my contract very very quickly. I’d suggest anyone having problems do the same: http://www.tio.com.au/