ADSL Australia

After 19 days I was finally able to get an working ADSL connection in my Manly apartment. My original plan was to get both a cable modem and ADSL, and then cancel whichever one I liked less. In this area you can't get a cable modem. I suspect this is because of my close proximity to the central office, and the fact that any company can compete on the same ADSL service.

One of the interesting things WRT Australian broadband is that you generally pay for your bandwidth. When you choose a broadband plan, you select both a speed and a monthly download allowance.

Initially, I wanted to forgo getting a land line. Unfortunately this is a requirement for one to get ADSL. I signed up with Telstra, since they are the local telco and they own all the copper. They were able to get the phone working right away.

I choose TPG for my ADSL internet, because they seem to have a good rate for people who use a lot of bandwidth. Currently I'm paying $59 for 30GB of downloads. Uploads with TPG are free, although some ISPs charge for data in other the other direction. When you go over you allotment, you either have to pay, or they slow your data down. My data is shaped at 256 kbps once I exceed my limit.

Initially, I purchased a Linksys WRT54G ADSL WiFi router. I liked everything about this router, except they don't offer a way to input DHCP reservations. IMHO, this is the best way to assign IP addresses to computers which you want to forward ports to. A week after signing up, TPG informed me that my ADSL connection was active. I checked the router and it showed no DSL carrier. I called TPG and they told me to call LinkSys. I called LinkSys and after an hour on hold I gave up. TPG doesn't support LinkSys, and LinkSys doesn't answer their support number - at least here in Australia. So I returned the LinkSys and purchased a D-Link. The D-Link does the same thing, but doesn't some features that I liked in the LinkSys. For example, you can make the LinkSys function as a bridge, or you can have it update the TZO DDNS.

Alas, the D-Link showed no carrier as well. I didn't figure there was anything wrong with the LinkSys, but I couldn't get anyone to admit fault. Now, I called TPG back and told them I've tried two different modems on every phone socket in the house, and neither of them show a carrier. At this point the tech says that he will do a line test. Sure enough, they are able to identify that it's not working, and they tell me a Telstra tech will fix it next week. The whole reason why I didn't get the line test the first time I called was because I was talking to a level 1 support person. My experience has taught me that the level 1 support person is only there to tell you to turn your modem on and off. Otherwise, they don't know much and can't help you.

So now everything is working. It's not perfect, but it's working. With the factory settings, my modem has a down stream connection of 12300 kbps, and an upstream of 1015 kbps. I did a speed test and found I could get close to these numbers. Unfortunately, my QOS has been particularly bad. In the speed test it was 69%. After Googling for this problem, I found that with a low SNR ratio, the modem will suffer from poor QOS. I changed my modems modulation from Multimode to G.dmt, and this has fixed my quality issues. My downstream SNR went from 6dB to 10dB. Of course my speed decreased, but it's still quite good. I'm connected at 8064/992 kbps and a speed test shows 6.77 Mbps down and 715 kbps up. Sure, I'm paying for a 24Mbps ADSL connection, but the slower speed fixes up the QOS.

Having complained about there being no free WiFi in Australia, I'm going to try to keep my router open. If neighbors leach all my bandwidth, then I'll have to encrypt it, but if not, I'm happy to share.

After numerous calls to tech support, I kept having to have them slow down my connection in order to get stable VoIP calls. Unfortunately, D-Link gives you no way of forcing a slowing connection, so you must call tech support. My current connection is:

Item	Downstream	Upstream	Unit
SNR Margin	21	6	dB
Line Attenuation	29	18	dB
Data Rate	3493	252	kbps

This is quite a bit slower than the 13mbps down / 1mpbs up, but it is stable. I only wish that I could get upload speed faster.