2006-10-20 Ramblings
Friday, October 20, 2006# We have a phone. We requested a phone from Telstra on July 17th and they finally connected it on October 20th.
# Here's a tip: if you have a special situation that requires special handling, don't bother with the main telstra number. From our experience all you get is a telephone operator who simply reads stuff to you off a screen. We often knew more than our Telstra contact because we could walk out the front and talk to the contractor face to face. You should find your Area General Manager and ring them direct. Once we rung the man, we had a phone within a week. Go to the Telstra Country Wide site and click 'Your Region". You get the name and number (and photo!) of the actual human being responsible. Nigel Beaman is the Area General Manager for South East Queensland and he was very helpful and actually got things happening. He even rang back 2 or 3 times to keep us posted.
# Of course no ADSL or ISDN is possible from our landline. We are connected through a multiplexing device called a RAM8, which I think stands for "Rural Access Multiplexor". It's a device that shares a single pair of wires between 8 subscribers, but only allows 6 simultaneous connections. It's a blocker for ADSL and IDSN and it limits dialup to 28.8k... bewdiful.
# So Satellite is back on the table. Also Telstra have released their NextG wireless service and surprise, we are in range! Which would be great except a 3GB plan @ about 1.5 mbps is $200 per month. How is this accessible broadband?
# Is it just me or is it clear that Telstra is just not interested in providing raw bandwidth? I think they'd rather sell content and the access to that content. Is this more than slightly concerning since they are responsible for the country's communications infrastructure?
#TinyMCE 2.0.7 has been released with the XHTMLXtras plugin from yours truely. Which kind makes my page redundant now! There's is the new hotness because they've simplified the date field and added spiffy icons.
#Millstream have published some of the Javascript code I wrote for them on their site under the MIT license which is very nice of them.
2 Comments
Telstra - as you expect this contact thingie doesn't help for the city folk... Pity. Problem with Telstra is they have fingers in Foxtel and are trying to be a content provider. They should focus on being a communications provider.
Feel the pain.. we are in a major city and can't get ADSL either. Due to bad network design. And they (Telstra) are trying to sell more shares... yeah right! :)
Hi Tuna, bad network design maybe but I also think it's because they are not required to do anything more. A Telstra guy said I could expect better than normal modem speeds through a RAM8... because Telstra are only required to provide a 19.2kbps connection to each household, 28.8 is awesome as far as they are concerned.
Now I'm grumpy.