So, time for another pointless update on myself (well, I may as well post, otherwise this place would be entirely dead).

I’ve posted a number of times before about my internet connection and that, and how you’ve probably figured that I’ll never shut up about it until something like the NBN comes (if it ever will).  But anyway, this might be a bit of a turn.

Right now, I’m on a 1.5Mbps connection with 25GB peak downloads and 120GB off-peak (2am – 12pm) quota per month. (if you’re wondering, the annoying slowdowns have since mysteriously vanished)  Exetel (my ISP) have decided to be a fag and increase prices by $10/month, so their lowest (non-shit) plan is now $50/month.  They have somewhat “compensated” by increasing quotas to 30GB+180GB off-peak (which will become 2am – 2pm), however, I’m already finding it really difficult to use up my current quota.

I’ve looked around, but for 1.5Mbps connections, it seems there really isn’t much cheaper available (thanks to Telstra’s dominance in the area) – probably the most I could save would be $5/month which would also require bundling with a phone.  Oh well.

So, back to the issue of using up the quota.  I guess I don’t really have to, but I guess I’ve developed this idea that I should, and despite myself saying it’s unnecessary, I’m always trying to find something to exhaust the bandwidth.  So yeah… downloading useless stuffs.  Especially difficult with me as I try to be conservative with bandwidth usage.  Am really starting to run out of ideas over what I should do with the quota – perhaps I should convince myself not to bother with it (and save some electricity by not having the computer on at 2am downloading stuff).

Stuck in a churn request to switch internet plans a few days ago.  I’m moving from TPG’s 30+30GB (on/off peak) 512kbps plan to Exetel’s 15+”120″GB (on/off peak) 1.5Mbps plan (it’s more like 100GB off peak, since it’s like impossible to get 120GB through a 1.5Mbps line in 6 hours per day for 31 days).  Both plans cost AU$40/mo.

Transfer completed now, but unfortunately, I still seem to be getting slow speeds at night 🙁 so I guess the speeds are really a Telstra issue, rather than an ISP one, which sucks, cause Telstra never fixes anything.

It does seem to be mostly going fine during the off peak time though, peaking at around 156KB/sec, averaging around 135KB/sec (which I guess is kinda crap, but probably Telstra’s issue again).

Unfortunately, TPG seemed to want a 30 day notification period or something, so we get charged a bit for that 🙁

Saw that TPG upgraded their $40/month 512Kbps plan to 60GB quota per month (30GB off-peak, 30GB on-peak) from the old 10+15GB/month, so I contacted my ISP (Soul) to upgrade the plan in-line with the TPG plan.  Sent it through and all that, so just need to wait for the upgrade.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t fix the speed issues I’m having (Telstra issue?), but hey, free extra quota, so meh.  Anyway, the off-peak allowance pretty much means that off-peak traffic is unlimited, as it’s only for 5 hours a day (4am – 9am).  That is, if I constantly downloaded for those 5 hours, fully utilising the connection for 31 days a month, I’d have to download at 52.5KB/sec (assuming 30GB = 30 billion bytes).  I get around 51-53KB/sec usually anyway, so for all practical purposes, it’s impossible for me to deplete the off-peak quota.

Everyone knows Australian internet sucks, especially if you’re stuck on a Telstra RIM, like I am. But regardless, I’m paying for 512Kbps internet, so I kinda expect what I’m paying for.

My current download speed is around 10KB/sec, about 5 times slower than it should be. Well, that’s not too bad, as I browse with images disabled, but it seems that pages sometimes cut out, so I have to reload it a number of times before it decides to comply…

And damn Telstra won’t fix their issue. I envy people complaining that their ADSL2+ is stuck at ~300KB/sec…