Thursday, January 19

Geek

Good Enough For Now

I have ADSL.

Not ADSL 2+.
Not ADSL 2.

This modem doesn't support ADSL 2+ as far as I know, despite the lying weasel "2+" sticker. I tried using it with ADSL 2, and I got a connection at 10.8 Mbps down and 864 kbps up. Sometimes for as long as five or six seconds. Then it dropped out. Many many times.

After a certain amount of fiddling, I forced the modem into standard ADSL mode, and it's now running at 4544 kbps down, 960 kbps up. That's a fair way short of 24 Mbps, but its a lot better than 1500 / 256 that I had before I moved, and a whole lot better than the 64k I've been surviving on since then.

The connection's been stable for half an hour with no packet loss, which is a good sign. I might poke at it a bit to see if it will give me a higher speed - or I might leave it alone for now. Yeah, I think that's a better idea.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:03 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Yay(ish)!

Posted by: Susie at Thursday, January 19 2006 08:52 AM (a0oF7)

2 What brand and model is your modem? It might simply be your physical distance that is preventing you from connecting at ADSL2+ speeds.

Posted by: Jojo at Thursday, January 19 2006 06:03 PM (OYwJ2)

3 It's a Netcomm NB5. It's not a very good modem, as far as I can tell; Netcomm keep shipping them to us by mistake, so I got one for free. I don't live that far from the exchange, maybe 1km, but there's no guarantee. I have another modem around here, a Netgear, but it's in a box somewhere.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 19 2006 06:18 PM (NCdT0)

4 Netcomm gear seems to be problematic the last few years. I've set up an NB3 from memory. Certainly not the slickest admin interface around. I hear alot of bad things about Netgear but I haven't personally had alot of problems. Certainly the DSL modems haven't been an issue.

Posted by: Andrew at Thursday, January 19 2006 08:00 PM (RWEVY)

5 Some NB5 modems might need either a hardware or a firmware upgrade to get ADSL2+ functionality. There was a big controversy about it a few months ago regarding misleading advertising. They have a free upgrade program running that may be worth looking at:
http://www.netcomm.com.au/Support/NB5/enquiry.php

Posted by: Jojo at Friday, January 20 2006 12:41 AM (OYwJ2)

6 Yep, I saw that. However, I'm coming to the conclusion that it's not a very good modem in general. We sell NB3's, but only because they have a decent diagnostic routine. The diagnostics on the NB5 are the worst I've ever seen. [For those who don't know, I work for a phone company. We sell ADSL, but we don't have any good high-end packages because we are re-selling Telstra products. So I went with iiNet, who are the reverse, a great ISP but a lousy phone company.]

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 20 2006 01:13 AM (RbYVY)

7 Oh. That explains your "...and I oughta know" comment a post or two earlier, then! *snicker* Makes sense now!

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, January 20 2006 01:35 AM (mAAjO)

8 I considered iinet when I was reviewing my broadband. However I decided not to when the rep I was speaking too coudn't give me a definite answer about silent number (which I currently have). I got a vague answer about Telstra settings coming across as are. But that they had no control over the landline config. Pretty much figured the same as you, they are up on their internet but not their phones.

Posted by: Andrew at Friday, January 20 2006 02:07 AM (RWEVY)

9 Totally unrelated, but Pixy, you wouldn't happen to know what my mu.nu user name and password is to access http://blog.mu.nu:2082, would you? Could you please e-mail them to me? yossarian9@hotmail.com.

Posted by: Ryan at Saturday, January 21 2006 06:25 PM (b4JBG)

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