Tag Archives: dsl

Blessed is the DSL

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As all you loyal readers should have noticed by now is that my blog has been a little quiet since I moved to Sydney. I can assure you it’s not from a lack of interest, but rather a lack of time and essential living resources such as DSL conspiring to prevent me from posting.

I’ve been in Sydney for just over 4 weeks now and have a few blog posts to write, so will complete these over the next few days. :-)

We managed to find a flat and moved into it 2 weeks ago, right in the middle of the CBD with only a 25min walk to my work office – sadly DSL took a little longer to get sorted (thanks Telstra @#$%^&*U) but I now have a nice shiny DSL connection with the good people at Internode.

It’s been an interesting experiment using 3G as my primary internet connection these last few days – as first it’s OK, but it becomes noticeable at how bad performing it is after only a few days. Slow bandwidth making downloads of small files a noticeable factor, latency making SSH connections laggy and non-responsive.

Even simple stuff like listening to music is hard – I have all my music on my server in NZ and simply play it directly off the samba share across my VPN and use cachefilesd to cache recently accessed files on my laptop – this works great on fixed line connections, but fails horribly on 3G which is generally fast enough most of the time for 256k MP3, but has nowhere near enough of a data cap and the connection drops really mess with playback.

The poor 3G performance is not helped by the fact that AU city 3G networks are generally poor – combination of factors, bad coverage, buildings and huge volumes of users, I actually found that NZ’s mobile network was generally better performing all round.

On the other hand, the new LTE networks (“4G”) here are stunningly impressive – colleague is frequently getting 24mbit (and as much as 32mbit) download on his 4G Samsung S3, which is even faster than my CBD ADSL2+ line. Of course this means you’ll chomp though your 1GB monthly plan in about 4.2 minutes… :-/

It was an interesting experience, but I’m now very happy to have a real connection back. Not having a home server is a bit of an adjustment, I’m down to just a DSL modem plugged into my Mikrotik RB493G…

I may look at putting in a larger file server cache locally here at some point, currently looking at the best option for pulling large content from NZ to AU and holding it in cache for the optimal time, almost need a cache that I can instruct to pre-seed on demand – eg  “cache all recent accesses from my NZ file server, but also cache the following 4GB file I’ve just requested so that I can watch it when I get home tonight”.

As I write this, we’ve only had DSL for 5 hours and have already pulled 2GB with just casual browsing…. I think the 200GB cap will be enough for us, but one of the perks of living in AU is that I could get up to a 1.2TB cap if I really wanted. ;-)

Half a Terrabyte

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With companies in Australia offering 1TB plans, us New Zealanders have been getting pretty jealous of only having 100GB plans for the same money.

Except that a couple days ago, my ISP Snap! upgraded everyone’s data allowance by at least 4x…. taking me from a 105GB plan to a 555GB monthly plan at no additional change.

Was a great surprise when I logged into my account, having only previously skimmed the announcement email which went into the mental TL;DR basket.

Good thing I got upgraded,used almost 50GB in 2 days :-/

I’m currently paying around $120-130 per month for half a terrabyte on a naked DSL line and to quote 4chan, it “feels good man”.

Of course it’s only DSL speed – although if I was planning to stick around long term at my apartment, I’d look into VDSL options which are available in some parts of NZ. And the first Ultra Fast Broadband fibre is starting to get laid in NZ so the future is bright.

For me personally, once I have 10mbit or so, the speed becomes less important, what is important is the latency and the amount of data allocated.

I suspect snap!’s move is in response to other mid sized providers providing new plans such as Slingshot’s $90 “unlimited” plan, or Orcon offering up to 1TB for $200 per month on their new Genius service.

TelstraClear is going to need to up their game, for the same price for my half terrabyte, I can only get 100GB of data – although supposedly at 100mbits/10mbits speeds (theoretically, since when they previously offered the 25mbit plan I couldn’t get anywhere near that speed to two different NZ data centers…)

Even with it’s faults, TelstraClear’s cable network still blows away DSL for latency and performance if you’re lucky enough to be in the right regions – they should press this advantage, bring the data caps up to match competition and push the speed advantage to secure customers.

Meanwhile Telecom NZ still offers internet plans with 2GB data caps and for more than I’m paying for 555GB, I’d get only 100GB. Not the great deal around guys… :-/ (yes I realize that includes a phone, that has no value to me as a mid-twenties landline-hating, cellphone-loving individual).

Why I hate DSL

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mmm latency, delicious delicious latency

I’m living around 8km from the center of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, with only 8 mbits down and 0.84 mbits upstream in a very modern building with (presumably) good wiring installed. :'(

The above is what happens to your domestic latency when your server’s cronjobs decide to push 1.8GB of new RPMs up to a public repo, causing the performance to any other hosts to slow to a grinding halt. :-/

On the plus side it did make me aware of a fault in my server setup – one of my VMs was incorrectly set to use my secondary LDAP server as it’s primary authentication source, meaning it called back across the VPN over this DSL connection, so when this performance hit occurred, the server started having weird “hangs” due to processes blocking whilst waiting for authentication attempts to complete.

The sooner we can shift off DSL the better – there’s the possibility that my area might be covered with VDSL, but since I don’t think we’ll be here for too long, I’m not going to go to the effort to look at other access methods.

But I will make sure I carefully consider where UFB is getting laid when I come to buy property….