Back on the air

After a frustrating weekend of ADSL outages a couple of weeks ago, thanks either to my ISP or, more likely, their upstream provider (the Australian Monopoly Telco Who Shall Not Be Named), I started hunting around for a new ISP. Just on a whim, I checked my exchange on the ADSL2+ roll-out status page at iiNet. And lo! It’s available!

So I signed up for their standard plan, which gives me “up to” 24Mbps and 10GB download per month (plus another 10GB off peak). Given that I haven’t had to try too hard to keep within my current 5GB (+5GB) plan, and iiNet’s 10+10 is $20/mo less, it seemed like a good place to start. I also get their local phone service (bundled with ADSL2+) and VoIP, which should be interesting.

The downside of upgrading from ADSL to ADLS2+ is that there’s no “fast churn”. In other words, I had to disconnect my current service and then wait for the new one to be provisioned. But now it’s active! (And only three business days later, which is better than I expected.)

I don’t have the new ADSL2+ modem yet, but even with my current modem (a Netcomm NB1300) I’ve seen download speeds of about 380KBps (that’s bytes there sonny), which is fairly impressive. Uploads are going at about 60-80KBps, which is a lot better than the old 24KBps. My line attentuation is hovering around the 50dB mark according to the NB1300, which I’m led to believe means I probably won’t get much more than 10Mbps anyway, but we’ll see how it goes when the new modem arrives.

It’s amazing how long five days felt without ’net connectivity, though… :-D