ADSL in the fast lane

May 26, 2005

After weeks of pain in the bad old days of dial up, our new ADSL connection finally went live yesterday. It’s amazing how a few weeks of dial up completely changed our habits: buying the paper for a TV guide, not checking email at night, wireless laptop never leaving the study.

Using iiNet broadband starter we have up to 1Mb/8Mb speeds with 4GB of data download a month for $39.95. Our apartment connection seems to be line synching at about 0.8Mb/2.3Mb which is a little disappointing, but not unexpected.

So far the speed seems to be highly variable, but is absolutely flying throughout the day. Even late last night things were particularly slow. I’ll give it a few days to settle in. For real numbers, the Oz Broadband Speed Test is helpful. We get about 200kB/sec real usage speed. When it works, it’s great!

Of course, in Australia the extra speed isn’t always noticable as it seems that most connections to US websites don’t run much faster anyway. I don’t know where the bottleneck is for these, but I guess that’s the beauty of the seamless connectivity / complexity of the Internet. Everyone can blame someone else.

PS: Using our Alcatel Speedtouch modem I could get the line synch speed through a lot of fiddling around to access the web interface (http://10.0.0.138).