In Limbo

Today started out well enough, a pleasant if sticky and sweaty pre dawn bike ride - we’re sliding down the hill into autumn and sunrise is now a little before seven.

I forgot to take my phone with me so I’m not sure of my performance, but it’s probably on a par with the previous week’s.

And then I spoiled it by contacting Telstra, our ISP.

We’re supposed to have a ridiculously fast 500Mbit/s connection - complete overkill but that’s what they upgraded us to in the last round of service improvements. Before that we had had a humble 100Mbit/s connection.

A few days before we went down to Mornington and Gippsland to see family, I’d run the Ookla speed test app on a whim and noticed we’d dropped back to 100Mbit/s.

In practical terms, it made no difference to our internet use - perhaps pages were imperceptibly slower to load, and we could still watch the tv shows we regularly stream, so I left it.

When we got back on Sunday it was still sitting at around 100Mbit/s, so I put contacting Telstra on my to do list.

That was probably even more of a mistake, because yesterday morning I noticed that pages from the Guardian were slow to load, and when I ran the speed test app we were sitting somewhere between 15 and 20Mbit/s.

So I ran Telstra’s self help test routines and yes, we had a slow connection. Only download though, latency (ping) and upload were fine.

Telstra’s automated self help routine flagged this as odd and said it would automatically rerun performance tests over the next twenty four hours.

Well, when I checked my Telstra app this morning there was both a request to message them, and a note to say that it had been flagged as a possible cable fault with NBNco.

(NBNco is the government owned corporation that owns the physical infrastructure - Telstra, like every other ISP in Australia, simply provides the services that runs on top of NBNco’s cables and allied infrastructure.)

So I contacted Telstra and spent an hour messaging one of their techs back and forth while they tried to fix the problem.

By tweaking port configurations they managed to get near enough to a 100Mbit/s connection, but when they tried the configuration changes for a 500Mbit/s connection it all fell in a heap, and our modem defaulted to the emergency backup 10Mbit/s mobile connection service Telstra provide.

 

10Mbit/s is the original speed of ethernet, and you can email, browse the web and even listen to an audio stream - we have an internet radio and that kept happily playing Radio National in the background, and files could be saved to the cloud, if a little bit slowly.

Just about everything worked, except for TV streaming.

You could even watch little video thumbnails - not surprising, the original cu-SeeMe video calling tool ran happily on typical 1990‘s internet infrastructure, even if the image size was pretty small.

So while we’re not exactly disconnected from the planet, we’re not exactly connected either...