Klutz questions again - VOIP handset and NBN modem choices

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Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

Sheddie, as a point of interest, what results do you get from this speetest site?

Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test

My ADSL2+ gives 20-22 ms ping, never >7 download, never >0.7 upload.

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NBN Fixed Wireless - tests done from my laptop via WiFi to Netgear N900 router, we pay for 25/5 plan

We don't have Netflix, but use iView sporadically and it works fine via this connection (also via WiFi)

My son in Adelaide is still on Dodo ADSL2 and his daughters are heavy Netflix users, again works fine for that.

It would probably be nice to have FTTP to every premise in Oz, but we have to be realistic that we have a relatively small population living in a large continent in mostly individual dwellings. Like any household as a nation we have to live within our means, all very well to promise the world but someone ultimately has to foot the bill and that will be the taxpayer. All these people that are screaming out for all these big spending projects are also usually the first to bleat and fart about tax increases!

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Originally Posted by ian

unfortunately, despite tax payers dropping $800 million to buy the Optus Cable TV network, the NBN won't be using most of it. Ref: NBN to abandon Optus HFC network in favour of FTTdP

Adopting fletty's mantra, the bright side is the proposed replacement seems to be better technology.


as regards the rest of the discussion
Coming from the era when 1200 baud was sufficient to co-ordinate all the traffic signals across Sydney, I've never understood the rationale for spending billions of tax payer dollars to give most Australians access to Netflix.


Gillard's public rationale that FTP would allow medical specialists to work remotely may have been true, but a cardiologist was never going to be basking on the beach in Perth while manipulating a $200,000 diagnostic machine in your house in Katoomba. The equipment costs and person to person engagement essential when a medical diagnosis is not good means that medical is always going to be consulting room to consulting room -- which is some tiny fraction of the total number of premises.

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They said the same about building the copper phone network all those years ago and look how useful that became. At a time when tech is becoming so important is it really that hard to see this as important infrastructure rather than just giving people access to Netflix? You're unbelievably short sighted.

It's a global economy now which means we need to be prepared for working and competing with people all over the world. The fact of the matter is our high cost of living, inability to innovate and our horrible infrastructure has meant we're almost completely unable to do so. Atlassian, one of our biggest tech success stories (valued at over $10 billion and started by two guys with $10,000 credit card debt) have most of their staff in other countries and have said time and time again how important the NBN was before it was gutted.

This country is running on the fumes of a long departed mining industry and a massively over inflated property market, don't you think it would be nice if we had another industry to take their place?

Fibre to the node over 12 months ago, Optus with standard Optus modem that everyone craps on. 200m from the Node with old Telstra underground phone wiring.

Upload 49 MB/sec, Down 20 MB/sec. Attainable down around 80 MB/s and 30 UP if I paid for faster level.

I used a large sealed battery and small trickle charger, made a DC inverter and that will power the Optus modem and Phones for around 3 days power loss.

Uptime (without powering down the Modem) had been close to as year, speed always the same day or night, had to reboot the other night but problem turned out to be an external router I am using.

Used the phones I was using in on the old Land line service.

One thing that was important was to get the Line in straight to the Modem with no other taps or branches to other phones sockets, then plug the rest of old installed phone cabling into the phone socket on the modem. Short in house connection to modem makes a BIG difference to speed, some "short" phone patch cable sold in stores are crap and can drop 60% off the DL speed.

Around 99.9% uptime with service - phone and data.

Massive change over the ADSL2+ that was running @ 9 MB/s up. Often download Win 10 updates from MS at consistent 48 MB/s (got to pick the right time for MS server load)

Sort of happy with it but as others have said, I feel cheated with the limitations of FTTN, it should have been FTTP.

Just did the speed test and it seems a bit slow this morning.

9- 79.70 - 1.54 and a retry shows 9 - 72.69 - 1.66

Could be that my daughter is still downloading a movie.


Peter.

We have a number of wired connections and wireless networks (4 base stations) in the house.
Speeds depends on how and where the laptop is connected.

Ethernet connections are pretty consistent - 2 - 49 - 19

Wireless ranges from, 3 - 48 -19 with laptop in same room as base station, to 5 - 20 - 10 when laptop is just making a wireless connection i.e. 1-2 bars of connectivity usually >2 rooms away.

Interestingly the best wireless performance is using a new Ubiquity base station which has the longest ethernet run from the main connection point to the house, to the Ubiquity basestation ~30m away. The Netcomm and Belkin basestations have the same download speeds (19) but ~5 Mbps slower upload.

There's also a wifi network with a 10 year old base station that I use to to rest gizmos. It's not normally connected to the internet but I temporarily connected it and it gave - 5 - 12 -14.

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Originally Posted by Sturdee

Just did the speed test and it seems a bit slow this morning.

9- 79.70 - 1.54 and a retry shows 9 - 72.69 - 1.66

Could be that my daughter is still downloading a movie.


Peter.

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Peter, surprised at how slow the upload is compared to download on cable.

Political posts (including mine) have been reported and as such have been removed.

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Originally Posted by bueller

They said the same about building the copper phone network all those years ago and look how useful that became. At a time when tech is becoming so important is it really that hard to see this as important infrastructure rather than just giving people access to Netflix? You're unbelievably short sighted.

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Perhaps and perhaps not.

Some perspective
Back when the NBN was to be FTTP and 100 MBit/s I was working on a suite of projects that involved regular access to a graphics server that contained around 5 Terrabytes of data. Because the graphic data files were so big, the organisation I worked for mirrored the data set on a dedicated server at each of its 12 main offices. These 12 plus the rest of the organisation was interconnected via a 2+ GBit/s WAN. Despite the 2 GBit/s speed, you could easily tell when the local graphic server was down through the impact on the WAN's speed as users accessed the graphics data from a server in another site.
At the time I was looking at options to work from home, but even at 100 Mbit/sec the NBN would have been too slow to be a viable option.

So maybe my skepticism of the NBN's original promise is based on past experience.

Optus cable - ping 10ms. 92.04 DL. 1.69 UL

Upload is abysmal

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Originally Posted by Lappa

Optus cable - ping 10ms. 92.04 DL. 1.69 UL

Upload is abysmal

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NBN or not (surely must be)?

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Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

OK, NBN is available to us now. We are 200 metres from the node and 35m from the grey pillar.

Just reading the spec on the Netcomm, and it says (down the bottom) that I can connect a regular phone to the FXS port, so does that mean I can buy something like these Siemens A220A sets, (a stinkin' good price there) and the A510IP I mentioned above is for what, exactly? Is it if I don't have a VOIP compatible router?

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Yep, you'd connect any cordless base to the FXS port and configure the Netcomm to use that for voip.

I have the three gigaset A220 handsets in the house plus two older gigaset A58 handsets in the shed, all connected directly to a Fritzbox 7390 modem router. The Fritzbox has a built in DECT base station, so you just register the DECT handsets directly to it, the bases are only used to keep the handsets charged. The Fritzbox has pretty sophisticated telephony features, including multiple built in answering machines, voicemail to email, call forwarding, etc. They also have apps for iPhone and android to use your mobile as an extra handset.

The older handsets are better than the A220 in a couple of ways - they are flat on the charging end, so can stand upright away from the base. Also, the Fritzbox lets you name handsets, but the A220 doesn't display the names. The A220 handset doesn't have a mute function either. They work fine, but if buying again I'd be making sure I had a match for the A58 feature-wise. I do recommend Gigaset because they are true DECT compliant (unlike Uniden) and because they use standard AA NiMh rechargeable batteries.

Thanks for all the info, that is the sort of thing it is hard to find. I guess I will have a surplus Gigaset base station when the NBN finally arrives, that is a really clever fully featured modem.

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Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

NBN or not (surely must be)?

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not NBN - just Optus cable. We don't get NBN until 2019

So I've been uncharacteristically quite for a while.:D NBN was supposed to be connected last Monday 10th July, but there was a problem. Turns out there was in incorrect connection in the grey pillar just out the front.

A speedtest shows 10ms Ping (half the previous ADSL2 time), 24 down and 4.75 up, so that's very good for the 25/5 that we signed up for.

Happy with that. :2tsup:

However, a couple of things don't make sense. Since being "connected" (or not) last Monday the ADSL2 modem has been working and we still had internet through the usual TPG connection.

Then, last Thursday I had a Sparky delete all the old phone connections and put a new one in a better spot in out Tech Room, using Cat 6 cable etc. The Netcomm modem (old ADSL2) was still working for a while, and then nothing at all after some hours. (but still no NBN)

I asked the NBN tech about this and he said the ADSL2 modem won't work on this new line (connected last Monday) because it's a different signal designed for VDSL modems (makes sense) but the VDSL can work as ADSL2 because they are beckwards compatible (also makes sense).

What doesn't make any sense is that we still had ADSL2 between last Monday and Thursday, so I can only presume that we were not connected at all last Monday as we were told.

One also has to wonder why the Internode sales or tech support people don't tell you that "your old ADSL modem won't work after Monday". Had they done this then I would have had a trigger for them to figure out more of the problem - if my ADSL is still working then there is quite clearly something up with the new system and a Tech could have been sent out sooner rather than later.

Anyhoo, all good now.

Westnet told us in all their documentation last December that you must contact them after NBN connected and ask for the ADSL to be disconnected. Something about them needing permission to do so. We have been with them for over 11 years and used them for the NBN as well. Gave the verbal permission and all done.