Narooma, Moruya, Bermagui and the surrounding region have long suffered internet troubles. From dial up issues when it rained to ADSL distances from the exchange and excessive line noise.
Australians were promised a world class fibre optic network designed to deliver 21st century internet around the country, including the South Coast. Yippee… but did you get it?
The NBN, as originally designed, is capable of delivering super-fast internet, despite misinformation those opposed tried feed you. Truth be told, it was boof-heads arguing against the NBN and design changes made by the Abbott Government whom are partly to blame for roll-out & performance issues. The majority of blame rests with your ISP. Contrary to popular belief you are not an NBN customer, you’re a customer of your ISP ( Telstra, Optus, IINet, etc.). Fibre underground will carry massive amounts of data and anyone telling you the old copper cables did just as well is an idiot. NBN Co. are wholesalers and your ISP purchases bandwidth from them. Retail ISP’s sell that bandwidth to end users, that’s you.
Let’s say I own an ISP and I purchase from NBN Co. enough bandwidth to offer 1,000 customers a 100 Megabit connection. Then I decide I need more profit and to increase my customer-base to 2,000 without purchasing additional bandwidth from NBN. Now 2,000 people are streaming Netflix, watching youtube videos and more over a connection capable of handling 1,000 people. Dodgy huh!
RETARDED ROUTING WITHIN YOUR ISP
We must also ask ourselves “how clever are our ISP’s network engineers” and can they correctly configure their routers! Like it or not, when you visit a web site your request will be routed through your ISP and onto its final destination. If your ISP has badly formed routing tables your request might bounce through more than a dozen unnecessary devices during its journey to hell and back.
Each pass-through device is called a hop and badly configured ISP routers can increase the number of hops and that slows you down. There are situations where tracing a destination might be more than 30 hops on one ISP but only 14 on another. Many years ago there was a situation where an ISP deliberately routed hops for another ISP back & forward across Australia a few times before reaching its destination. There intent was to make their opposition appear slower than they really were. I wont mention names.
The bottom line here is that your ISP is not fallible and may have incorrectly configured routers, each of which slow you down.
YOUR HARDWARE
Let’s look at you now. You have signed up for a 25, 50 or 100 Megabit connection and your NBN is installed & activated. You are now faster than you were with ADSL and enjoying your new found internet freedom.
But wait, suddenly you begin to wonder if it really is much faster. You’ve paid for fast internet but things are only marginally faster.
Your biggest problem might be your PC or Laptop. Depending on age, your hardware might no be equipped to handle 100 Megabits of data being thrown at it. Some older Ethernet connections might only be 10 Mbs. Your wireless connection may only be connecting to your network at 3 – 5 Mbs and moving away from the receiver just makes it worse.
Even if you have the latest Gigabit network adaptors if you aren’t using very old Ethernet Cable it might not be able to deal with hi-speed data.
The internet is a collection of millions of small networks, just like yours, and many home networks are not configured correctly. Getting the most out of your internet connection means matching components appropriately for best performance. I liken it to a homemade car, you’ve put a four cylinder engine into a Mack Truck running on four wheels you’ve stolen from some wheelbarrows. It’s a beautiful thing to look at, but it doesn’t go very well.
Call me and I’ll check the specifications of your hardware, cabling, wireless channel & adaptor and ensure you get the most from your NBN connection.