Bend in the Weather

Our Billion 7300G has been on it's last legs for a while.

It slowly been dying a slow and painful death for anyone that came in contact with it. 

Slowly but surely most of it's functionality was dying.

• The wireless AP would drop a wireless client that hadn't sent any data for more than 5 minutes.  The only way to avoid that was to login a remote SSH session and use the keep-alive option.
• Transfers across Wireless that went longer than 10 minutes would hang the modem.  (Not really good when ya trying to do a dist-upgrade!)
• Any form of P2P would lock the thing up after about 20 minutes


• Whenever the unit had it's firmware upgraded (often) you would need to manually reenter all the configuration, you couldn't 'restore' anything without fear of it stuffing up!
• Over the past week it's decided that I need to be restart approximately every 7 hours as it would overheat.  You would need to leave the thing down for about 30 minutes before it became usable again!
  

The total lockup every 7 hours was the final straw...

I should have realized something was up by the comments on the Billion Support website, and the amount of firmware upgrades the thing required.  (1.35 and at RC48 and counting!)
Many people complained about the wireless issues, but they were told by support, 'do this, do that', yet nothing really resulting in fixing it.

Lock-ups were also common, and it was known to have problems with many VOIP providers as well as fail miserably at P2P.

Really, in the end there wasn't much good you could say of the modem.

---

I had a whinge to David Gillies, who mentioned he's been extremely happy with his NetGear DG834G.

Recently we purchased a notebook.

Yesterday Pauline and I picked up a Wireless Access Point so we can use the laptop around the house without the need for an ethernet cable.

We've purchased a D-Link DI-524 Wireless Access Point, which is capable of 802.11b and 802.11g.

I'm sitting here typing away on the notebook whilst watching the cricket and being connected to our LAN at a very nice 54MB/sec!

It certainly makes programming and working on the Internet much more pleasant.

It's going to be a rough few months ahead of us all with ADSL. Many will find that they will have disconnections for a period of time over the next few months.

The reason is Telstra is upgrading all their current ADSL1 hardware (DSLAMs) up to ADSL2+.

This is actually a GoodThing^(tm). ADSL1 is capable of speeds of up to 8Mbit down and 1Mbit upload (though Telstra restricted it to 1.5Mbit down and 256Mbit upload). ADSL2+ provides speeds up to 24Mbit down and 1Mbit upload; resulting in faster speeds for us all.

In order to do these upgrades Telstra has to go to every exchange and physically upgrade the software and sometimes the hardware on the DSLAM. This means a disconnection from the network. You can check if you have an upcoming (or current) outage by visiting this web page.

Normally, your ADSL connection will bounce back after the upgrade. However some ports (where you physically connect to the exchange) may not come back cleanly. If this is the case your ADSL connection won't be established and is in a state of 'limbo'. You may even find that whilst your ADSL and PPP lights on your ADSL router are solid, that you cannot get any connectivity to the Internet.

You can do two things:

1. Ring your ISP and request a 'line reset' be undertaken by Telstra... this can take some time to be actioned.
   
2. You can manually reset the line yourself.

How do you reset your line yourself?

It's quite easy. The ADSL exchanges run an automated robot that will check every line each hour. If there is no connection on the line the port is reset. You can force the robot to detect you have a problem and it will do the line reset for you.

To do this... it's quite simple.

1. Turn off your ADSL router.
2. Unplug the modem physically from the phone line. (Take the plug out).
3. Leave it disconnected for at least 1 hour. (You may also wish to leave it disconnected overnight if it's late in the evening... it will be ready to roll the next day!)
   
4. After an hour, plug the phone line back in to the ADSL modem.
   
5. Turn the modem back on.
   
6. Wait 2 minutes for it to establish the connection.
   
7. Now see if you can web-surf.
   
8. If this still fails, do ring your ISP and request your line is checked and possible manually reset. There may actually be other issues.

It's important to note that this obviously won't work whilst they are upgrading the exchange! You'll need to wait until that is finished. Telstra try to do the upgrades from 11pm - 6am weekdays to minimise the impact to most people.

It's likely that this will continue over the next few months until all the exchanges are upgraded.

Hopefully this helps you all get back and running!