Thursday, 16 October 2008

Broadband, U Doin It Rong...

Okay - a few linkable articles have showed up, I'm happier.  Then I read this and I get sad again.

See, I have for almost five years fought with my ISPs and with Telstra about getting new copper line or something because, frankly, my ADSL connection sucks the big one.  Right at the limit for ADSL, the line wasn't even good for dial-up, with every modem I ever tried having to reconnect ten to thirty times a day.  (Yes, that is definitely THIRTY on some days, costing around $8 in dialling fees on those days.)

When ADSL became possible I used an ADSL modem that had given great results in the city of Perth, and watched the connection stay unconnected up to 12 hours a day, in annoyingly random chunks.  Sometimes there would be a whole hour of staying connected, sometimes the connection would drop out after five minutes and stay unconnected for an hour or so...

Multiple complaints over many many months produced a slight improvement when a technician replaced water damaged connectors in the comms pit, but it was still dodgy and slow.

Oh and did I mention that this was NOT country WA, but still in the capital city, Perth?  Yeah, that's right, I feel very sorry for people in rural areas but come on, why talk about doing rural areas right when you still haven't mastered basic urban areas?

Oh - and lastly - I will be minding a friend's farm which is within 30km of several midsized towns.  It has satellite Internet, a lag of 2 seconds for everything you do...  Broadband?  She wishes she could have dialup speeds as long as it didn't take half a day to do the banking online. 

(exits stage left muttering something about utter balls-ups...)

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