Online With The NBN

I received an email around 3pm Tuesday afternoon from Telstra advertising all their NBN services and to 'connect now'!  I really don't think that it was the formal notification that my NBN connection had gone live, but I plugged all the bits and pieces in anyway, connected the landline phone to the modem/router and waited.

I noted the 'Connected' light came on almost immediately after I powered the NBN Connection box.  Then another "DSL" light came on.  I then powered up the modem/router and suddenly my PC indicated I was online!

My modem/router is now just used as a router and distributes internet across the house via Ethernet cables or by wifi.

A quick trip to the Speedtest website showed I was getting 47MB as a download speed which is pretty good. I didn't mind the connection being a day earlier than I had been told.

Around 45 minutes later I received a call from Telstra, this time checking that all had gone well when I connected.

We are on a Fibre to the Curb (FTTC) connection while most of our area will be on the standard Fibre to the Node (FTTN).  Many locals continue to wait for their FTTN connection to go live. They have been told to expect connection by November 1.

Has it made a difference to my downloading habit?  The answer is yes by quite a bit but not as much as I had hoped.  There are two limiting factors to downloading, how fast is my connection and how fast is the website with the download releasing the file.  So my 47MBps download speed is hindered if the source site is releasing it at 30MBps.

Some sites release files much slower than others so it is a little hit and miss.

Overall I am delighted with our move.  The landline phone (which we only use for incoming calls) works without a hitch.  Some NBN users with different suppliers can experience problems with the old 'landline phone' connection.

The rainfall up here has been incredible over the last week or so.  We have now had well over 10" or 250mls of rain.  We have gone from a dry year to one which is around average.  Areas about 50k's to north of us (around Noosa) have had twice the rain we have had.

I managed a bike ride yesterday but today's ride was thwarted by a very light rogue shower.  It was enough to make the roads and footpath wet.  Today there aren't any mudguards on bikes so a bike ride on wet paths means you get sprayed all over.