Record setting ADSL!
Yesterday we got the phone connected at our new place, as you’ll have no doubt read. A few minutes after I spoke with Telstra, I used the signup pages at Westnet to connect our ADSL line at home. I threw in the phone number, and the signup process went through OK.
Then this morning I got a call from Jonny saying that the connection was rejected because when Telstra tried to check my line it hadn’t been connected. This halted the process; dead in the water.
The nice chaps at Westnet reinitiated the connection process this morning, and we were underway again. This was at about 11:00AM. Then at just before 4:00PM this afternoon, I received an email saying that our connection had not only been provisioned, but that it was completed! Our ADSL was connected in five hours, not two weeks, which is the ususal waiting time!
I got home, and sure enough, the connection was up and we had line sync. Now we’re connected, and I’m back online. Telstra are no longer in my bad books, and Westnet is on the top of my ‘wicked IT company’ list, just behind The Frontier Group ;)
Five hours? Impressive. Here it would be more like five weeks. I can’t even get ADSL with NTL - it has to be cable. Boo!
Shyeah! Way to go Westnet! :)
Hale, whats wrong with cable - isn’t it faster or does it grind to a halt at 3pm when all the kiddies down your street start ripping pr0n? In the US cable has a much better reputation and ADSL is plagued with problems (kinda like here).
Withered: The telco infrastructure here is a few years behind ours, and their broadband is not particularly fast or reliable. At the moment, the fastest home connection you can get with any ISP is 1meg/s. Next month 1.5meg options will start appearing.
The US has had cable TV since the 70s, and hence has a much better cable network than other countries do so I’m not surprised its better over there. Here pay TV is usually satellite based, so there isn’t as much cable in the ground.
I don’t mind cable itself - at my work in Sydney it was uncapped (we’d get up to 600kbytes/s), but when the neighbourhood kids came home at 3:30 it dropped to dialup speeds. Also, it didn’t work when it rained for some reason. Not the most reliable connection.
Those two factors, plus all the complaints on forums I see about how unreliable NTL cable is, add up to me preferring dialup, despite getting kicked off every 2 hours (which every ISP over here does).
Intercontinental wireless network anyone??? ;)