Lets take a few microts (seconds in FarScape-speak) to mourn the loss of my Nortel Networks 100 series cable modem. It has served faithfully from early 2005 on the second day that Optus@Home was rolled out to greedy bandwidth junkies everywhere. It has survived storms, stupid misconfigurations at home, and terabytes worth of.. 'bittorrent linux isos' downloads.
But like all good things, it has to come to an end. When I first got cable, I was getting 1.2Mbyte/sec downloads. Two years ago I got 600-700kb/s and I figured it was just because there were more users on the network. More recently I realized I was actually maxing out at 250Kbytes/sec and THAT was unacceptable. First reaction was to move over to this new sexy ADSL2+ technology that everyone raves about. It was all good until I realized how expensive it was! Even internode, one of the cheaper vendors was 2.5$/Gig whilst optus is about 1.94$/Gig. With the number of TV shows I watch, this is terrible. Besides this, ADSL hasn't had a stellar record for reliability. I regularly hear of ADSL outages whilst with my 7 years of optus cable I've could probably count the optus@fault outages in mere hours.
So I rang up optusnet support, lied about my download speed (Optusnet do not help you unless you're below 200kb/s) and got them to finally look into my case. Their suggestion based on their tests indicated it was time to replace the modem. So the optus tech came over and replaced it on saturday with a new Motorola SB5 series modem. I think the results speak for themselves.
Old Modem
Line speed = 1.89Mbps
download speed is 257kb/s
New Modem
Line speed = 10.59Mbps
download speed = 1.27MB/s
Long live Cable!
1 comment:
I don't think all ADSL is unstable - just the network management of the ISP, maybe. When I was with iiNet, at least once a month I'd offline for a few hours (and they seemed to have DNS issues fairly often too). Now, on Internode, I haven't had more than a few minutes of outage in almost 12 months.
The difference is purportedly due to Internode having a much better network than most, including larger dedicated links to the US.
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