eagles-lair.exagorazo.net

welcome to our ADSL - Assymetrical Digital Subscriber Line

We have been running on a 512 kbps down - 128 Kbps up service since our connection to internode.on.net almost at the end of December 2002.

Australian ISPs tend to set up accounts at different costs by virtue of the bandwidth the customer consumes. We had a low bandwidth one while we examined what our usage was likely to be.

Generally, customers will opt for a Dynamic IP rather than an unchanging one that has the same uplink speed as downlink speed, because of the costs involved. ADSL is considerably cheaper than SDSL (Symmetrical Digital Subscriber Line).

Over the intervening three years, due to advancing technology and improved operations, our ISP has reduced the cost of larger bandwidth accounts dramatically. In fact at the time we changed to a higher speed plan, we were paying a lot less for a 16Gigabyte a month account than the original low volume one.

In the middle of 2005, Internode advised that after lengthy and extensive beta testing, they were able to equip their customers' phone exchanges with Cisco DSLAMs to accomodate an almost unlimited speed, using the new ADSL-2 technology.

We are unable to show you the typical up-link and downlink performance of a 512/128 ADSL connection, because we did not save one of those speed test reports from earlier on. However below you can see what the account's parameters were once we applied for ADSL-2, what our ISP calls an "Extreme" account. The graph is for an ADSL-1 account, though, as the service had not yet been migrated, while waiting for hardware, permission from the phone company to access the premises, and availability of ISP staff.

Once we had paid for the upgrade in speed, the speed test we did on 1st August 2005 looked like this...

The "Cut-Over" proceeds, slowly... The next "snapshot" we tool was on 30th August (It says 29th, but that is because the testing local was on the east coast of the USA). In actual fact the cut-over had been done a couple of hours earlier in the day...

Now that speed doesn't look particularly astonishing, but the phone exchange was swarming with people from the phone company and from the ISP and as we discovered a bit later, some exchange reconfiguring was needed.

Each time my IP changed, I took the opportunity to recheck the line speed, as soon as I was aware of an IP change. This next one looks a bit better :)

This was taken after the exchange failed (as far as ADSL-2 was concerned) on Wednesday 3rd September, requiring human intervention to fix what I am led to believe was a configuration error

I'll continue monitoring for a few more days. There is still this annoying time-out glitch nobody can pinpoint... it is milliseconds in duration and results in a forced IP change. Blame has been pointed at my end, but a few milliseconds long glitch should not cause an IP change... and by definition it has to be at the ISP's end to do that. This is the only complaint I have with my ISP that is unresolved; their suppoprt is 24/7 and they have been really helpful as well as knowledgeable.

I suspect they are not particularly interested in this problem which would not really affect anybody who wasn't running chat channel bots locally, nor "Not For Financial Gain" vhosts on a web server.

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