Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

If I didn't have bad luck...

The man from Chorus rolled up this morning to install my VDSL connection.

As instructed, I'd set up the new modem (running on ADSL2+ for the time being) and was eagerly awaiting the ability to upload my YouTube videos in minutes rather than hours.

All was looking good, until he arrived and made a call to check on the cable-length from my house to the cabinet.

This would be no problem (I thought to myself optimistically), after all, Telecom's own speed test indicates that I'm now getting 11.36Mbps of download speed which is 2.5 times what I was getting before.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well it seems that despite the Telecom sales person assuring me that the figures she was seeing (when I called to arrange the VDSL connection) were the best she'd seen, apparently this VDSL2 thing wasn't going to work.

The contractor discovered that there is in fact some 4Km of cable between me and the cabinet from whence the VDSL2 would be spewed and that means way too much attenuation to be practical.

He said he could "give it a go" but it was *very* unlikely that it would work and that once I'd been switched to VDSL2, if it didn't work then I'd have to go back to Telecom and arrange for the service to be switched back to ADSL2 and that could take several days -- leaving me "disconnected" in the meantime.

What the hell are Telecom playing at?

Are their records and testing systems really so screwed up that suddenly I'd gone from "the best figures they'd seen" to "not going to work"?

Of course there are are probably plenty of folk reading this who are getting way less than 11.36Mbps out of their ADSL connections and who are probably asking themselves "what's he moaning about"?

Well it's not the download speeds (I don't actually do that much downloading and live very comfortably within my 120GB monthly cap) -- it's the paltry upload speeds that ADSL2 offers which are the problem.

Even now that I have more than doubled my download speed, the upload speed remains unchanged at 0.98Mbps and that means that uploading a GB or larger video file to YouTube takes an eternity (sometimes two eternities!).

The lure of VDSL was that it would slash those upload times by a factor of 10, turning hours into minutes -- ah, the bliss!

So what happens now?

On my desk is a flash new Telecom fibre/VDSL/ADSL modem that was "free" as part of the VDSL upgrade offer. Do I have to return that? To be honest, it's a pretty crappy modem -- providing little in the way of stats and no apparent way to set the DNS servers being used (I like to use Google's DNS server for my primary, not Telecom's often flaky alternative)

So huge disappointment and frustration here. What a bugger!

As I seem to say a lot recently -- if it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all :-)

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say in the Aardvark Forums.

PERMALINK to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font