Island Life: Internet the way you want it
89 Responses
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Not a bad nom de plume that, the grey shadow, maybe an aged super hero.
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I forgot to associate the selected image with my email address, just went and did that so good old animal should be popping by in a couple of minutes/hours/days/weeks?
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Speaking for the people on the interwebs - the Grey Shadow!
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Last Result:
Download Speed: 1413 kbps (176.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 76 kbps (9.5 KB/sec transfer rate)and this is on a saturday afternoon when people are out doing stuff, BTW the test data corresponds to the time it is posted +/-- a minute or two.
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PS. I'm on the 20GB/month plan, which gives 4Mbps down/2Mbps up.
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Hmm. Here in sunny Greenlane I see (Orcon DSL) 2188 down and 716 up. Considering I have plugin filters and a degree of dodginess in the phone wiring that's not too shabby.
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Myself I'm on the gone largely undelivered plan, no data capo and supposedly "as fast as your line will allow" (insert tui ad here) only $50 a month mind, but I would like to actually get the service promised in advertisements though.
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That 716 up is good, the 2188 down not so good. Are you pretty close to the exchange stephen?
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520 is Remuera in my distant and vague recollection, and so at least a couple km away.
Because I'm renting and leaving town soon I have no filter and *cough* my router/modem is hanging off an extension because of the impractical faceplate location. Therefore I think I'm probably not getting the best connection I could.
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Remuera is the one that got upgraded ever so slightly recently so dear old Jenny could have broadband(sic) but it sounds as though you are getting better than a lot of us, well, me especially. Apparently the potential line speeds on the copper network are some where around 7.5-8 Mbps! so we're getting around 20-25% of potential. Thats pretty crap really. I would also think that the little bit of malarky you've had to install to get around place ment issues at home wouldn't have a super major effect on that. It's the network that gets the stream to your place of residence thats the crucial thing. Still it is better. I wonder does consumer have a comparison guide for bband plans like they do for power companies.
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Just had a look it's only available to subby's
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while we're at it, does anyone know if its possible to set PAsys up to show the most recent post rather than the first? Could this be done RB?
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"Apparently the potential line speeds on the copper network are some where around 7.5-8 Mbps"
That's only true if you're very close to the exchange with low line noise, few other devices on the wire, and so on. 3 or so is as good as most people can expect.
Several years ago (round 2001), when few people used DSL and fullspeed was the norm, I got 6 Mpbs in Berhampore (Wellington). I have never had anything like that with DSL in any location in New Zealand since.
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I have telstraclear cable on the 10/2Mbps plan and got this:
Last Result:
Download Speed: 9161 kbps (1145.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 2130 kbps (266.3 KB/sec transfer rate)when i first went on to the plan i was only getting 3000kbps, but it turned out to be my network card settings - large packets or something causing the problem.
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while we're at it, does anyone know if its possible to set PAsys up to show the most recent post rather than the first? Could this be done RB?
Just click "last post" for any thread from the home page (or the Publ;ic Address Cafe page) - that's what I do. I'm not a big fan of threads that run in reverse chronological order - they make you read arguments backwards.
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I particularly like the way Metafilter handles this. What you see as a logged in member is something like this:
blah blah (45 comments) (7 new)
If you click on "45 comments" you go to the beginning of the thread. If you click on "7 new" it takes you to the first new comment since your last visit, which is generally exactly where you want to be. Not the last comment in the thread, but the first new comment.
I'd love that in PA, because I hate clicking "last post" and then having to backtrack to join the dots between what's just been said and what I last read.
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If you click on "45 comments" you go to the beginning of the thread. If you click on "7 new" it takes you to the first new comment since your last visit, which is generally exactly where you want to be. Not the last comment in the thread, but the first new comment.
Stephen, this is on the development plan somewhere, but the best way to get back to the first new post since your last visit currently is to use the email subscription link on a topic. It's up near the top of the page by the RSS feed icons. You get a single email when there's one (or more) new posts, with a link to the exact location of the first new post. Monitoring via RSS works in a similar fashion.
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Can't be swelling my inbox any further, I'm afraid, but I'll investigate the RSS option. Glad to hear further tweaks are in the works.
You could do worse than have a hard look at Metafilter for features - it's a had a LOT of careful usability tuning for a community site over several years, and it shares a similar kind of vibe to what I think PA is trying to create.
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Just to make sure that the d-slamming (ahahahha!) is fair here, I want to point out it's not a bad technology. It uses existing resources to deliver good speeds. DSL is not limited to 2-3Mbit/s for most people with only those living right next to the DSLAM getting marginally faster speeds. Think six kilometers for 2-3Mbit/s instead.
I've never had less than 5-6Mbit/s and I live quite a distance from the DSLAM (not too sure how far away it is, unfortunately).
Cheapo DSL modems will not train properly on the DSL signal and will produce inferior performance, but that's another issue altogether.
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I do have a cheap DSL router these days (one of the old DSE modem routers XH1149 I think). I'm not upgrading because I'm moving to Wellington soon and I hope to have lovely 10Mbps cable. It would be interesting to know what the best and the worst modems are though.
However, I think many urban users are in fact 5-6 kilometers away from their exchange. Unfortunately I don't know where to get a map of exchange locations, and Telecom's database of line speed and location is not publicly available. The number of people sharing your piece of copper is also important. Where I live seems to have the unfortunate double whammy of being distant from the exchange but with a lot of users. And the technician who called at my last place (who was English) told me that Telecom use the BT system but broke all the BT rules about how many phones should be hanging off the same piece of copper ("broke" = too many, of course).
Anyway, I just thought Reece should know that depending on where he is, DSL performance is not Telecom's fault, except in a long-term planning/capital investment sense. 7-8 Mbps is the best possible result and it is not going to be the performance the large majority of users see, even without rate limiting.
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(Oh yeah, 3 Mbps or more is pretty acceptable performance in that at that speed, many sites can't deliver that fast to you. While it's nice to have 10 so that your network Linux install from Citylink doesn't interfere with your video, that's icing for me).
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What do you mean by "sharing your piece of copper"? Customers normally get their own separate line pairs. Otherwise it'd be a party line surely, which won't work with DSL.
I'm not sure what the techie you talked to means exactly, but it sounds like he was concerned about the power requirements possibly being exceeded through Telecom allowing too many sets to be connected by customers - this could be the REN or Ringer Equivalence Number. I don't think it has any bearing on the high-frequency DSL signal though.
Telecom can in fact do an awful lot to improve the quality of the last mile copper by maintaining it properly and not taking short cuts like excessive jointing instead of replacing with fresh lengths.
The 8Mbit/s top speed down and 1Mbit/s up is the maximum determined by the first generation (not quite, but that's accurate enough for this discussion) ADSL. Presently, Telecom is installing the next generation DSL, which can provide up to 25Mbit/s tops, and 15 or so Mbit/s on average down, with 1 to 2Mbit/s upload speeds, depending on which standard is being used. ADSL2+ is also meant to have more robust signalling so goes further and has better performance at the same distance than existing ADSL.
Testing DSL modems is... interesting. You have to simulate a multitude of realistic line conditions but even then your results may be off because the manufacturer issues a firmware upgrade that makes the modem behave better.
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You know... I don't know what I mean by that. I think that was me misremembering the problems of crosstalk as pairs get bundled up into binders.
I shall cease wittering about things where my knowledge is marginal now :)
It'll be nice when that ADSL2 actually gets retailed...
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Most of the issues with Gravatars now seem to be ironed out. If you've created one but it's not showing on this site, make sure you "associate" the image with your email address. This is a crucial step (probably should be automated) in the process.
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nope.....
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