When I found out that Schloss Merkel was located in the NBN trial site in Brunswick, Victoria, it wasn’t a hard decision to sign up. After all, it’s very important to me to have faster access to pirated TV series experience this new technology to be able to inform you all about it. Of course, for good and bad, my experiences as an early adopter in a trial site may be very different from those in the mass deployment phase!
The first stage of the process was the installation of a mysterious gray box on an exterior wall by NBNCo, a couple of months ago, well before a service was available. We also had NBNCo’s film crew on the street next to us, apparently making a training video (though given their budget they should subcontract their training videos to Disney studios).
Several months later, after perusing the various bits of junk mail from the ISPs offering NBN plans, I went with iiNet, partly because they seemed to offer a good deal on the 100 Mbps offering, and partly because they have a reasonable reputation.
iiNet have a dedicated NBN sales force at the moment, and given its presumably small size it’s no surprise that they were pretty competent and well-informed. I organized a plan, a “modem”, and a connection date – Thursday the 8th of December, at 1pm.
First up, my shiny “modem” showed up in its box. Physically, it’s identical to any of the ADSL modems going round at the moment. The only difference is that the modem’s software had (theoretically) been preconfigured to connect through an Ethernet cable rather than ADSL.
At 1pm on Thursday the 8th, Geoff the NBNCo contractor showed up to install the NBN’s hardware. This was supposed to take a couple of hours. It turned into a six-hour saga, spread over Thursday afternoon and Friday morning.
The first part of the job was to test whether the fibre-optic cable terminating in the gray box outside my house actually had an optical connection to the rest of theNBN. According to Geoff’s magic laser detector, it didn’t. Several hours of mysterious stuffing around, including mobile phone conversations with NBNCo HQ later, this was finally rectified, but this only brought us to where we should have been at 1pm. Geoff arranged to come back the next morning to complete the installation.
The next morning, the order of business was first to attach some electrical conduit to the outside wall, drill a hole through the wall, and carefully poke some more optic fibre through to the next NBN box collection, which you can see here:
These misbegotten pieces of over-engineering are a classic example of the power of legacy systems to complicate things. All the electronics is actually in the smaller box at the top. Into the NTD (my guess – Network Terminating Device) goes the fibre-optic cable. Out comes up to two traditional phone plugs and four Ethernet sockets. The second, larger box is simply a power supply for the NTD.
So why the enormous power supply? Because the damn thing contains a huge lead-acid battery, to enable a (non-powered) traditional telephone plugged into the voice socket to keep functioning, even if there is an electrical blackout. iiNet doesn’t even bother to offer traditional phone services over the NBN. If you want a phone, they’ll sell you a voice-over-IP connection, at a tiny fraction of the price of traditional line rental and call charges. But just so Grandma can keep her phone as-is (I wonder whether the NTD supports pulse-dial telephones), we end up with this mess. The kicker, of course, is that lead-acid batteries have quite a limited lifespan. I have to wonder if and when the pooh hits the fan, whether this battery backup will actually be functional.
Frankly, it would be a lot simpler to optimize for the common case and put together a “grandma pack” (including a UPS, and a VoIP phone adapter) for the increasingly rare group who actually need a battery-backed fixed-line phone.
Anyway, rant over, and back to the install. After screwing these bits and pieces on to my interior wall, Geoff spent another three-quarters of an hour playing with the fibre-optic cable, to achieve the best possible optical connection. I was surprised he spent so long at it – 100 Mbps does not in any way push the boundaries of what fibre optic cable is capable of. He agreed, but apparently at this stage NBNCo would prefer to do a “perfect” installation rather than rely on the margin of error available.
Then he hooked the fibre up to the NTD.
It didn’t work.
Several more phone calls later, it turns out that the NTD he had installed was a dud. This is also apparently not an uncommon occurrence in these initial installations.
After installing a new NTD and confirming it was working, it was time to fill in the paperwork. Put it this way – NBNCo has a lot of potential for business process improvements if they want to save some time (and thus cash) on their multi-billion-dollar rollout.
Anyway, Geoff headed off to his next installation saga, and I proceeded to phase 2 – installation of iiNet’s supplied modem.
I opened the box and carefully read the installation guide, which was a model of straightforward English. I was to turn the box on, plug the ADSL line into the ADSL plug on the modem, then connect my computer. Which would have been great, if iiNet had sold me ADSL networking services. A quick poke around on the NTD, and the modem, suggested an alternative. I took a punt and connected one of the Ethernet data ports on the NTD to one of the Ethernet ports on the modem, plugged my computer into one of the other Ethernet ports on the modem, and turned the box on.
You’ll be shocked, at this point, to hear that it didn’t work.
I placed a call to iiNet technical support. Their automated system told me that I could wait in the queue, or organize to get called back in 15 minutes. At this point, I decided an uninterrupted lunch was a higher priority.
An hour later, I called technical support again, and organized the automated callback. 15 minutes later, as promised, I got a call. While the helpdesk operator hadn’t done an NBN installation before, she and the helpdesk scripts identified the problems, one by one. I’d guessed right – we were supposed to connect the modem to the NTD by way of the Ethernet plugs. However, iiNet, contrary to the claims in their marketing literature, had not actually configured my modem properly to work with the NBN. Compounding the difficulties, it turned out that one of my Ethernet cables (not supplied by iiNet) was a dud. After swapping the cable over, and fiddling around with a few settings on the modem, the familiar purple hue of LP started to appear. I now haz NBN!
As I said at the very start, I expect many of the bugs in the installation process will be ironed out over time. What’s probably more interesting is what having the NBN does to your network computing experience.
The short version – it is faster than even a high-speed ADSL2+ connection, and it makes a notable difference if you’re trying to watch high-definition video. 1080p YouTube, for instance, plays flawlessly, something that didn’t used to work perfectly over the ADSL connection. Particularly if there are two people in the house trying to watch different bits of streaming video, an increasingly common situation in Schloss Merkel. However, in many cases, servers simply can’t supply data fast enough to take advantage of the link’s full speed. A download from my university’s file server was at about 1.6 megabytes per second – about 50% faster than I’ve seen over my ADSL2+ connection, but less than 13% of the my link’s nominal capacity.
Still, right now, and even though I have about as good an ADSL connection as is physically possible, the NBN is clearly better in practically useful ways. And it will get better over time, as the rest of the Internet’s infrastructure is upgraded to feed the fatter local pipes. And if you’re struggling with slow and unreliable ADSL – let alone dialup – it’s like night and day.
Sigh. For only about $300,000 we could sell here, buy something similar a kilometre south and be in the NBN zone. I envy you people with your snazzy modern infrastructure.
But not as much as Canburros envy anyone with ADSL2
Working from home is currently enabled in my job, but I feel technologies like this will render many offices obsolete. Already our office has converted many of its desks to hot-desks, and people only come in once or twice a week. Technologies like this will enable us to never come in at all, really.
A lead acid battery! Wow.
Alas, I moved to rural Vic so I’ll not get to see this. It’s 4g wireless for me eventually, I suppose.
Pulse dial? Hmmm. Slightly more likely than being able to warble up a handshake (which would probably mean connecting at 128 bits per second)
At 100 Mbps, I’m wondering how fast my kids could use the standard 20GB on torrents. I’m thinking minutes.. Linux distros, of course
We’ve been with IINET for years. The pre-configure thing is a bit of a mystery. When we upgraded, the first modem they sent us didn’t and I had to configure it. When it borked the replacement modem did it all out of the box, barring security stuff.
Darin @ 5 – people on plans where they count uploads as part of the quota are going to want to configure their torrent clients very carefully – or they’re going to find themselves bandwidth limited for most of the month
Well, they are clearly going to have to streamline their install process if they want to get this out to 8+ million homes!
This is a Community Service Announcement proudly sponsored by Captain Obvious.
Mercurius – the installers will get much better with practice. I had one of the very early ADSL connections in my area and had to help the Telstra technician with how to use ftp. They’d taught them what to do but it was pretty clear they had little to no understanding of what they were doing!
Hot off the press — a memo circulated within NSW Dept of Education advising NSW public schools not to connect to the NBN…the ostensible reason being a “five-year fixed-price contract with Telstra” is in effect.
Smells like a political fix to me!
So what’s the deal Robert, will my current ADSL modem do the job with a bit of re-configuring (perhaps a firmware flash) or is there another bit of kit involved. Current config is ADSL2+ modem in bridge mode to an ADSL2+ wireless router (4 lan ports). If I was to get the NBN box on the wall bit installed would I be able to configure my current kit to work with it?
Patrickb, if you’re sufficiently motivated you should be able to make it work.
My reason for getting the new modem was that it supported a bunch of features I wanted (802.11n, particularly), and to avoid tech support hassles at this embryonic stage.
That’s more likely.
@Patrickb: I think your wireless router should do the job with the proper configuration.
Instead of bridging the connection from your modem, the same cable should just plug straight from the router into the NTD. Then it’s just a matter of adjusting the WAN settings in the router (I believe).
Gosh … they lhey were untidy with their cable placement. I wouldn’t have accepted that at school.
As you say though, they will get better at this as they identify all the problems, develop tighter procedures and train all relevant staff.
Sorry but I think it is totally cool that they have allowed people to plug in their old steam punk landline phones. I’ll never give mine up.
For anyone who wants to keep using a rotary dial phone, converters are available. e.g. This one
Er no Fran, 1.6 MBps means roughly 16 Mbps, which is entirely possible on a 100Mbps connection.
Mbps = megabits per second.
MBps = megabytes per second.
IMHO, Fran’s correction was correct.
I don’t think so, John.
If not because the speed of 1.6 Mb/s (about 200 kB/s) would be fairly slow for ADSL2+, let alone fibre, then because Robert would most likely be judging the download speed of a file from his Uni server through the reported speed in his browser download which is always reported in MB/s… 1.6 MB/s is entirely reasonable on his 12 MB/s fibre connection.
I believe that the term “byte” is essentially undefined.
Various authorities, dating back to the 1970′s, define the byte variously as between 4 to 36 data bits and perhaps more, depending on the capacity of the processor being used to handle the data.
On reflection, the original user may have used the term megabyte, thinking that it actually means something which, without further context and information, it does not, ie the fairly common but not yet ubiquitous 8-bit byte. Is there some kind of SI unit called the byte? Not that I can find. By itself, the term is either misleading or meaningless.
Am I being overly pedantic, silly, or just plain wrong? Is there a modern standard definition of the data byte which renders my history lesson obsolete?
And, if modern usage has it that a byte always and only means 8 bits, then what do I call the 32-bit string which a 32-bit processor uses? Is it a quadbyte? And 64 and octobyte?
An analogy: In nature, an animal’s foot may have 1 (horse), 2 (cow), 3 , 4 or 5 (human) toes. We all know what toes are. To know how many toes are on each foot one needs to first know which animal is being discussed.
Similarly with the number of bits per byte. What animal is being discussed?
I’m not entirely sure, but I think we may be missing the point here…
By convention, line speed is always documented in bits (thus the difference between the old cat5 cables at 100Mbps and cat6 at 1Gb), whereas storage is documented in bytes.
Just for amusement, 4 bits (half a byte) is called a nibble. So the word size on your 32-bit processor might be 8 nibbles …
When I referred to 1.6 MB/sec, I was referring to megabytes, not megabits.
For further amusement, let’s have a debate as to whether I was referring to multiples of 1,000,000 bytes, or 1,048,576 (2^20) bytes
And, for the purposes of this discussion, there are eight bits in a byte.
Why would anyone ever want to count to more than 255 anyway?
Further, I believe the correct spelling for half a byte is actually nybble.
No, DI(NR) — nybble is an alternative spelling to the most common spelling, nibble, which was itself expressly devised because of the homophone between byte and bite. Nybble more expressly links the term with the spelling: byte.
“Why would anyone ever want to count to more than 255 anyway?”
It wasn’t really about counting to 255 though was it, Robert
Rather how many bits were required to reproduce the character set of a standard typewriter, plus a handful of other useful symbols. Even the earliest computers used 64-bit word lengths to store and calculate numbers.
John Bennetts @ 20 – you’d be pretty hard pressed to find a modern computer that doesn’t have 8 bit bytes.
I think you might be referring to 32 bit integers rather than strings (which doesn’t really make any sense). I don’t know of people who call them quadbytes etc – these days people would just talk about 32-bit ints or 64-bit ints.
Robert @ 23 – And just to complicate things further I’d guess that you were measuring effective speed rather than the actual number of bits or bytes transmitted which would include all the network protocol overhead.
Your university download experience does point out one rather significant issue. Its most often not that universities and corporations can’t get faster links (they already have fibre). The infrastructure is there if they want to use it. Its that they don’t want to spend the money to pay for the extra bandwidth. The NBN is not going to change that situation significantly.
Chris@28 – you’re right, that was effective download speed – but given all that, the point was that the fibre was very far from being maxed-out.
As for universities getting faster links, there’s every reason to suppose they will want and get them over time, when professors in the VC’s favourite faculties start complaining how long it takes to send multi-gigabyte files home to work on.
Robert @ 29
About the only time I max out my ADSL download speed is when I torrent
A much faster upload speed will be very welcome though.
Extra bandwidth is not cheap and they’ll have to find the extra money from somewhere. I would not be surprised to see a combination of increased bandwidth (which Universities have had to do in the past anyway with the growth of ADSL) and some QoS. So “important people or faculties” get a higher priority on bandwidth than ordinary staff who in turn get a higher priority than students.
This is just like reading a slashdot thread, only in purple.
“About the only time I max out my ADSL download speed is when I torrent A much faster upload speed will be very welcome though.”
Probably the major portion of the benefits of the NBN will come from the vastly faster upload speeds.
Robert, thank you for a clear and fair description of your experience connecting to the NBN. It’s helpful to hear a real story with plenty of detail so I’ve forwarded a link to the activation guys at NBN Co. I expect they’ll find it interesting. I love the “grandma pack”!
Though, in retrospect, “grandma pack” has all sorts of sexist connotations which weren’t intended.
Surely you would have reported mebibytes if you had meant 1,000,000 …
Whoops I mean mebibytes for 1,048,576 of course.
{/law of recursive pedantry}
Actually, Nick @ 27, early machines tended to have 36-bit words, which is partly, at least, because EBCDIC was a 6 bit character set. (Yes, I am that old.)
I agree that the process did not seem ideal, and I hope they get much better at it. However, in their defense, I would say that many, many people have had similarly fraught (or worse!) experiences in trying to get ADSL or ADSL2+ connected to the house over the last decade, it might simply be the case that initially setting up/ trouble shooting these connections is sometimes challenging. e.g.:
- it took over 20 days to switch from a ADSL2+ account to an ADSL2+ with home phone account on TPG, and I needed to make a line account with telstra first before they could do it, which later then got cancelled. The telstra line took over a week because the technician had accidently wired our house to the townhouse next door, so we were getting their calls (20 days without internet OMFG!).
- I remember once in about 2001 having to wait months for an ADSL connection because the exchange had no spare ADSL connections available at the time.
- a friend at the moment is stuck with crap internet because: his house is pair-gain wired so cant get ADSL2+, telstra cable doesnt run in his street, and optus is saying that it will cost $3k to install a new pole and cable to their house, because his pool is in the way and they won’t install cable across a pool.
In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman imagines a Beowulf cluster of YOU!
DI(nr) @ 37, I was thinking of this guy…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030
And I have to admit I’m nowhere near that old, but I did see it at the Musée des Arts et Métiers when I visited Paris some years ago…highly recommend that museum for anyone visiting there, even just for its Metro station whose platforms walls are made entirely of copper! Kinda like walking into steam punk heaven.
My only experience with mainframes was my mum plonking me in front of a terminal at work when I was little…she used to work for IBM before I was born, then later BHP which was then this was, and then for Workcover later on in life before she retired…a lot of SAS stuff for those last two, I think…don’t know what model IBM that was (this was early 80s), but that thing was basically my baby sitter for a good year or two. She could leave me there for hours unattended, and I remember her workmates popping in now and then to show me tricks to keep me amused
I might have mentioned this before, but its a good story I like about my mum and me, so I don’t mind repeating it…one of many formative fun times in my life.
Which didn’t all take place in front of a computer, btw!
Underpaid and Overtaxed
Wed 14/12/2011 – 10:44
Mr. Turnbull, the same applies to you as well, The argument for implementing WWAN technology should be backed up with solid, technical and industry established facts. For example, how would you address data packet loss (WWAN signal is burst transmission, not stream transmission)? How would you address LoS (rule of thumb- the more visibility of sky, the better your reception)? How many more towers are you willing to put up (and bear in mind these towers have an exclusion zone around them)? these are just a few questions a lot of people will be asking.
Senatory Conroy- Snide remarks are not a sign of an intelligent person, its a sign that someone is far out of their depth. While your speeches are typed up by someone who may have a vague clue about the technology, better heads than yours or mine have dedicated their lives researching technologies around broadband communication, its worthwhile to have a chat with them. And also to show us the full justification of spending $36billion when we have a massive soverign debt.
source: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/410178/conroy_nbn_lecture_lacks_intellectual_rigour_turnbull/?fp=4&fpid=78268965 , comment 2
Oh yeh, upload-speed is what defines the usability of the internet!
MUSICIANS, for a sneek-peek example into upload-speeds power to transform this very earths culture, wonder in awe at what a world will look like after real-time-jamming becomes a reality!!!
THE NBNS POWER IS VERY GOOD NEWS FOR AUSTRALIA AS A ONCE CLEVER COUNTRY AND TONY ABBOTT KNOWS ANY OPPOSITION WILL BE QUICKLY UNDERMINED BY A BASIC ‘FOLLOW THE MONEY’ STRATEGY AS EMPLOYED BY THE GENERAL VOTING POPULATION THAT WILL THEREFORE EASILY SELL LOTS AND LOTS OF PAPERS: HENCE HIS SILENCE!
TONY ABBOTTS SILVER SPOONER BRIGADE LOVES THE NBN AND HE KNOWS IT!!
MALCOLM TURNBULL AINT GOING OUT LIKE THIS SO LOOK OUT TONY ABBOTT!!! JULIE BISHOP WON’T BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE FOR ANOTHER LEADER EITHER AS IT IS BEYOND THE PALE THAT THE DEPUTY LEADER HAS NO ROLE TO PLAY IN A DIRECTIONLESS PPOLITICAL PARTY!
3Snow_Crash
Wed 14/12/2011 – 16:52
Someone should advise Mr. Turnbull that the ICT industry’s de facto broadband network standard is FTTH and is currently being rolled out worldwide.
FTTN broadband networks are now being made obsolete as it is outdated technology.
Google Maps shows the worldwide status in its
A World of Fiber (to the Home) A collaborative map of fiber to the home deployments worldwide.
..
SAME SOURCE AS #42 , LOL, BUT COMMENT 3, … DOUBLE LOL!!