I am blown away by the number of applications that will be available by the Apple App store. The keynote that shows a sample of these applications is simply amazing.
This device is going change how a lot of us work and communicate.
I’ll consider the purchase of one in the near future.
My wife had a nice little argument with a Telstra Supervisor just on Tuesday. It appears our attempt got parked. So she proceeded to let them have it.
By the time that 30min call ended, they had found a port and set the service to provisioning.
Wednesday evening it had DSL sync and working.
Unfortunately it came at a cost. That cost was the fact the foolish person who provisioned it, managed to screw our voice service. Yes, you guessed it. We now have no dial tone on our phone service. So I can’t make calls or even accept them.
Logged a fault today, they said it will be fixed by Tuesday. Of course I got the usual spill about troubleshooting, so I repeated myself a few times to indicate it was fine until your incompetent tech attempted to enable DSL. Before that, never had a issue. After that, no dial tone. Unbelievable.
In any case the ADSL1 1500 line speed seems fine. It’s stable and as fast as it should be for this service. Attainable line rate appears to be not crash hot, but it’s fine for the service I have. So that’s good enough for me. Just a real shame they had to kill our phone service in the process. Wish I checked it 2 days ago. We don’t usual use the land line during the week..
In other news though, 2 days after my wife’s call the Telstra Wholesale report came out and indicated that several days earlier the RIM had 40 available ports. Be interesting to see how many of those are still available in the new report due out on Monday I believe.
Those who have been following the Broadband saga would know I was waiting on Telstra to provide more ADSL ports to our local RIM.
Our 3rd application attempt as made back on 22/11/07 was put in hold and has been in hold until today.
In that time, my neighbour moved in next door about 3 months or so ago and attempted to get his service transferred, but was unable to do so. Of course no available ADSL ports.
I arrive home yesterday evening to find out my neighbour just got his ADSL activated with Bigpond, yet my Internode service hadn’t happened yet. Talk about being really annoyed.
I’d previously called Bigpond months ago and was told they had no ADSL ports according to the online system. But when I called lastnight they advised they had some. So my wife and I opted to apply immediately, as it would appear Bigpond give it’s own customer preference, when they probably shouldn’t. So at this stage I’ve been advised the service should be provisioned by 2nd April. Will be interesting to see if it happens, I certainly hope it does. As much as I don’t want to be with Bigpond, we will make it work for the period in which we have to do so. Just be nice to finally get ADSL, as I haven’t had a decent ADSL service for probably close to 2 years.
Stay tuned, I will provide updates as they happen. Long weekend will delay the process a little, but hopefully we should see some updates mid next week.
The application was rejected, as per before. No ports available in the RIM, and well no ETA for upgrade. I guess we will just have to apply every 2-4 weeks until it happens. In the meantime I emailed the Federal Member, although that probably won’t do alot. I might look at getting some other affected people involved, soon as I determine what my best actions would be.
In the meantime decided the best alternative is probably to pickup an Unwired modem and use Unwired. It’s not entirely ideal, as I can’t work from home. But I can atleast use the internet for various things as required. Further more it will allow us to get our guide data to our devices on the network that require it.
I’ve since obtained a modem from a friend 2nd hand, just need to enable it and pay up for a plan etc. The only thing I need to do is save up to buy a router to run it, although in the meantime I might pull out an old machine and run Linux to do the job (until I can budget the cost of the router in).
Today was the day that we wired up the house. A friend with the help of his own brother came to install all the wiring for the alarm system. So that’s all the sensors in various rooms and also the window reed switches etc. All I can tell you is it was lots of cable.
While they wired the alarm stuff, I set about wiring in the number of cat5e cable runs I did from the various rooms. I wanted to make sure every area that had a tv in the future would have a dual cable run of cat5e. I managed to get this done. They all terminate back into the room we have made as our home office.
I then ran 2 more cables from the first phone point into the Kitchen and then into the home office. These will allow us to loop the phone line from the lead in to other parts of the house. In this case, allow us to have an unfiltered phone service in office for ADSL router/modem. The cable run to the Kitchen will allow us to have a filtered phone service for the install of a DECT phone to cover the rest of the house. Our main bedroom upstairs is the first phone point from street (where the lead in is terminated).
We also got speaker cabling done too, so the theater room will be well wired. Front/Rear speakers, and we also ran 2 more runs. One for the dining area, and then another for outside entertainment area.
I can’t tell you how much alarm cabling was ran, except it was a lot. We managed to use 250+ metres of cat5e though and then about 180 metres of heavy duty speaker cable.
All in all, a productive day. But I can assure you I am so sore and tired. Took a number of photos so that I know the position of each data cable, so once we move in we can pick them up and mount the wall plate on the wall. Not to mention all the alarm has to be wired up with the sensors and main control box etc.
Internal walls should go up about Wednesday, the A/C ducting and stuff should go in tomorrow.
Can’t wait to move…..
On the account that the ADSL service (if you could call it that) is being terminated finally tomorrow, I’ve been looking to see what we could get to use for about 2 more months while the house is finished off.
Had considered dial up, but ideally didn’t want to use it if we didn’t have too. In the end we enabled Three’s X-Series plan on my wife’s Three mobile. Just as well we get a 3service signal from the rental. Which means the traffic is part of the plan usage. Otherwise it’s $1.65mb if it’s not.
Tested it out for the first time lastnight using her MacBook to dial out the phone using Bluetooth. Worked great and probably as fast as a 256/64 ADSL connection. So not bad. It’s only for about 2-3 months.
EDIT: We signed up for the Platinum service, in case anyone was interested. Wanted to make sure we had enough included data per month. Of course she doesn’t have an X-Series capable phone for the other services, but to enable it you either put her sim into a capable phone to activate it or use one of the many documented ways to get around it (all you need is Firefox with user-agent switcher) and a bluetooth enabled on the phone so you can dial out with it to the Three intranet.
If it’s not known, but since getting ADSL some 4 months ago it’s been a huge problem. Constantly being disconnected and loosing sync all the time. It follows a pattern, but basically went from every 20mins loosing sync, to every 7 mins in the extreme case.
So yeah our internet connectivity has been a pita. I spent about 3 months dealing with Netspace and Telstra to resolve the fault. In that time it never got resolved and I wasted 3 months dealing with it. Sure enough Telstra would claim it’s in the house end. They did check it on a site visit, but the tech who did so never updated his work order to reflect it was okay. From that point on they insisted I have a 3rd site visit to check something we had already had checked. So I fought it, and tried too. In the end I requested to get out of contract and well Netspace screwed me around. In the end they made me last out my last remaining 2 months of the port contract.
As of August 8th, I’ll finally be able to drop the service. Finally be rid of the issue. Although very disappointed by Netspace. It’s the 2nd time I’ve had issues dealing with them when I have a line fault. Lesson 2 learnt. I’ll never ever use this ISP ever again. Even if they have the best price. It’s just not worth it.
If you’d like to read a little more about the ordeal be sure to check out the following thread here on whirlpool forums.