A recent experience buying a 110 punch down tool.
Above are two 110 punch down tools, the yellow one is a Harris-Dracon (US made) tool from 1990 or so, the blue one is a 2023 copy from China. Continue reading A recent experience buying a 110 punch down tool
We have had wired broadband service delivered to these premises for almost ten years, supplied by six vendors: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Amaysim, Southern Phone, Exetel, Sumo and then Kogan.
During this period, I have conducted routine download tests and recorded the speed. It is interesting to compare performance of the vendors.
This is an end to end file transfer test, and may depend on other organisations for part of the connection. In all cases, the server was provided by an Australian organisation, and probably located in Australia.
Telstra was a monopoly supplier of fixed broadband during this period of service, and it shows in the performance figures. Continue reading Broadband providers are not equal
We have had wired broadband service delivered to these premises for almost ten years, supplied by six vendors: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Amaysim, Southern Phone, Exetel and then Sumo.
Problems were experienced with the existing Engin VOIP service and a new MyNetPhone VOIP service.
Neither worked from either of my broadband gateways’ integrated ATAs, but they did work to some extent from a stand alone ATA on the internal network.
Notably, the address assigned to the outside of the gateway is a private IP address, and therefore this must be at least one more stage of address translation between the gateway and the public Internet.
Network Address Translation (NAT) frustrates VOIP which has to sense and work around the NAT scheme in use (there are no standards, implementations are proprietary), and cascaded implementations are likely to further frustrate operation.
I did manage to get the stand alone ATA to connect and handle incoming calls and outgoing calls by enabling STUN to assist the SIP addressing operations… but the connection would fail after a few days, and the only measure that was effective in restoring VOIP service was to reboot the gateway. Rebooting the gateway caused a new address assignment and obviously a fresh table of address translations in Optus’ NAT box… and things worked for a few days again, then another freeze.
A fault report was lodged but there was no response after two days, this lack of ongoing reliability of the Sumo / Optus / NBN service for VOIP was reason to quit them.
It was a pity to need to quit Sumo / Optus / NBN, because download speed was consistently good.
Above is a plot of download speeds over the month of service. Continue reading Sumo broadband Internet access
We have had wired broadband service delivered to these premises for almost ten years, supplied by five vendors: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Amaysim, Southern Phone and then Exetel.
At The first seven days of Exetel broadband Internet access I discussed the performance failure of the service observed over the first seven days.
Following that, a fault report was submitted to Exetel, and at their request, further observation of speed and ping test latency.
I have an expectation that “I want it to deliver most of the rated speed, most of the time during the hours that I want to use it”.
As a result of behaviour of the industry, the ACCC gives some guidance on terms used to advertise a service, and a service expectation.
Essentially they say:
Standard Plus Evening Speed—plans using this label will deliver a minimum speed of 30Mbps during the busy period. This plan would be suitable for a higher usage profile (e.g. streaming an ultra-high definition movie and streaming music on one or more other device during the busy period)
So on that measure, how well did they perform?
Above are the results of file transfer tests conducted automatically, the above are filtered for those in the ACCC’s defined “evening hours” on which they base their service level enforcement. All x symbols in the pink area break the 30Mb/s minimum. Note the number of x symbols on the speed=zero axis. Continue reading Exetel broadband Internet access
We have had wired broadband service delivered to these premises for almost ten years, supplied by five vendors: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Amaysim, Southern Phone and now Exetel.
At The first seven days of Exetel broadband Internet access I discussed the performance failure of the service observed over the first seven days.
Following that, a fault report was submitted to Exetel, and at their request, further observation of speed and ping test latency.
I have an expectation that “I want it to deliver most of the rated speed, most of the time during the hours that I want to use it”.
As a result of behaviour of the industry, the ACCC gives some guidance on terms used to advertise a service, and a service expectation.
Essentially they say:
Standard Plus Evening Speed—plans using this label will deliver a minimum speed of 30Mbps during the busy period. This plan would be suitable for a higher usage profile (e.g. streaming an ultra-high definition movie and streaming music on one or more other device during the busy period)
So on that measure, how well did they perform?
Above are the results of file transfer tests conducted automatically, the above are filtered for those in the ACCC’s defined “evening hours” on which they base their service level enforcement. All x symbols in the pink area break the 30Mb/s minimum. Continue reading The first 21 days of Exetel broadband Internet access
We have had wired broadband service delivered to these premises for almost ten years, supplied by five vendors: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Amaysim, Southern Phone and now Exetel.
The change from Amaysim was at Amaysim’s choice, they decided to quit the wired broadband business stating that they could not make a profit, and they sold their customer base to Southern Phone.
Southern Phone was unable to deliver the VOIP service we have had for many years through all of those broadband suppliers, so we churned to an Exetel “Standard Plus” service.
The cutover was badly coordinated, there was a 12 hour outage, and I had to phone Exetel (yes, wait in the interminable queue to try to get the modem PPP credentials, it had DSL service and was routed to Exetel, just needed the authorisation details for Exetel).
Telecommunications providers are all about strong procedures for handling usual business, and this part of the business is known as provisioning. The events with Exetel hint that their provisioning processes are not sensitive to churning an existing NBN connected service which should be done to minimise disruption, including advising the logon credentials, doing it when their support desk is open, holding if the customer needs a new modem etc. This is the bread and butter of the business, but a FAIL to Exetel on this occasion.
First impressions are lasting ones… so how do they come back from that start?
I have an expectation that “I want it to deliver most of the rated speed, most of the time during the hours that I want to use it”.
As a result of behaviour of the industry, the ACCC gives some guidance on terms used to advertise a service, and a service expectation.
Essentially they say:
Standard Plus Evening Speed—plans using this label will deliver a minimum speed of 30Mbps during the busy period. This plan would be suitable for a higher usage profile (e.g. streaming an ultra-high definition movie and streaming music on one or more other device during the busy period)
So on that measure, how well did they perform?
Above are the results of file transfer tests conducted automatically, the above are filtered for those in the ACCC’s defined “evening hours” on which they base their service level enforcement. All + symbols in the pink area break the 30Mb/s minimum. Continue reading The first seven days of Exetel broadband Internet access
We have had wired broadband service delivered to these premises for almost ten years, supplied by five vendors: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Amaysim, Southern Phone and now Exetel.
Download speed is an important performance characteristic, and fairly quantifying it is a challenge.
If I were to express my service expectation as “I want it to deliver most of the rated speed, most of the time during the hours that I want to use it” we can express that by better defining the three terms:
Let’s consider that most means 80%, so the critical value of speed is 80% of the rated speed, eg 80% of 12Mb/s is 9.6Mb/s.
Let’s consider that most means 80%, so the critical value is 80% of the time.
I sleep at nights, and use the Internet variously during the day, the most important times for service to be adequate are from 06:00 to 20:00.
Capturing the foregoing, I could write “Download speed must exceed 80% of the rated speed, 80% of the time between the hours of 06:00 and 20:00” each week.
This is known as a Service Level specification.
Statistically, this is stated as the 20 percentile speed measured between 06:00 and 22:00 over a week must be greater than 80% of the rated speed.
A realistic simple HTTP download is scheduled every half hour, and the effective download speed is recorded. This data has been gathered for many years.
Over the nearly 10 years of service, the rated speed has varied, 8, 12, and 50Mb/s at different times. To compare these, the speed in any one observation needs to be normalised to the applicable rated speed, so for this purpose speed is calculated as a percentage of the applicable rated speed.
Above is a plot of the measured speed over a period of many years. Continue reading Yet another change of Internet broadband access
We have had wired broadband service delivered to these premises for almost ten years, supplied by three vendors: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, and Amaysim.
Amaysim has supplied a 25Mb/s broadband service for a month now and set an important baseline for service.
Above is a plot of the 90 percentile and 10 percentiles for each week so far. Continue reading First full month of Amaysim broadband broadband Internet access
Review of 10 months of iiNet broadband Internet access detailed a fairly disappointing performance record of our first NBN based service, a 12/1Mb/s FTTN service from iiNet.
With a perception that online performance had degraded and was unsatisfactory, the results of an automated half hourly file download were consulted to verify those perceptions.
Above is a plot of the 90 percentile and 10 percentiles for each week. Continue reading First full week of Amaysim broadband Internet access
On 5/10/2016 we cut over to a new broadband Internet access service, switching from Telstra 8Mb/s ADSL to iiNet NBN 12Mb/s.
Over some years, I have run an automated file transfer to measure the speed of our access service. The tests are done between 6:00 and 22:00, I am interested in performance during the times I want to use the service, and less interested in times when I would usually be sleeping.
One of the performance measures is speed, it seems simple enough especially when it is talked about by politicians and promoted by RSPs and NBN’s advertisements.
So, how does one characterise the speed. People like to think of simple concepts like ‘average’, but let us look at the distribution of speeds.
Above is a chart of the frequency distribution of speed observations for a week in March 2017. It is not in the form of the Normal Distribution, the classic bell-shaped curve for which common parametric statistics like Mean (average) and Standard Distribution are meaningful, but it is a skewed distribution. Without knowing the characteristics of the distribution, it is a misuse of parametric statistics to apply parametric statistics like Mean (average) and Standard Distribution. Continue reading Review of 10 months of iiNet broadband Internet access