A public holiday installation

Saturday, November 11th, 2017 at 09:02pm

About a week after signing up with MyRepublic I received their modem/router, but did not yet have an appointment for the NBN installation.

The fine print did say that the NBN install might take up to four weeks, so I kept waiting… Until I received an SMS saying my NBN appointment was scheduled for 7 November between 8AM and 12PM. Hold on, 7 November is a Tuesday, the first Tuesday in November, otherwise known as Melbourne Cup Day, a public holiday… At least I wouldn’t have to take time off work… hopefully the appointment was correct…

Which it was. Around 9AM the technician showed up. He had seen where the NBN utility box was and I showed him where I wanted the connection inside. Initially he wanted to install it on the skirting board, but I insisted it be a wall plate. Once installed he plugged in the cable modem and after it showed it was connected his job was done.

I plugged in the ISP modem and after about an hour I saw that it said it was connected. Plugging in my laptop (my desktops were still using ADSL via my existing router, didn’t want to change with that yet) and found that while it had been allocated an IP there wasn’t any data flow. I gave it a few hours and tried again, same result. Reset the modems and gave it another shot, still no usable connection.

When I got home from work the next day I checked it again, still no usable connection so I contacted support. I couldn’t get through on the phone and it was a bit of a hassle over email, but eventually they said there was an NBN issue and they might need to send out an NBN technician. Not good, but I wasn’t too concerned as I still had my ADSL connection.

Every so often I would check if it was working, eventually today (yes, four days after initial connection) it was working. First thing was to run some speed tests, which gave me mixed results. Speeds as fast as 80Mbps, but also as low as 30Mbps. Why so variable? Looking through the results I found that the closest server by ping was also the slowest speed, a number of slightly further away servers would give the faster results.

For now I am still using my router behind the MyRepublic router (I case it doesn’t stay up and I need to switch back) and the last few hours have been weird as my internet is just working. There are some podcasts downloading and I am watching something off YouTube, these are two things that I have not been able to do at the same time on my ADSL connection….

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