Autumn has arrived on the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula.
It started to rain in Victor Harbor the morning after we arrived back from the photographing in the Coorong:
The mornings are cooler, the light is softer, there is less wind, the days are more overcast, and there is more rain. Summer is going.
Our time since we have been back has been spent trying to get connected to the National Broad Network (NBN) via its fibre to the premises (FTTP) infrastructure that has been installed around Victor Harbor. This part of the Fleurieu Peninsula (and Willunga) has avoided the fibre to the node (FTTN) that is one part of the multi-technology mix. This type of infrastructure is a fairly outdated technology in that it still relies on copper, thus distance, attenuation and noise problems and what-not limit its ability to provide long term speed increases and require heavy maintenance costs.
We discovered that though the Encounter Bay section of Victor Harbor had gone live whilst we were away, our house still wasn’t connected to the fibre cable in the street. In fact the connection from the premises to the street had been postponed until August 2016. Were were amongst those people who have been passed and are waiting months for activation.The NBN advised us to request a demand installation through Internode, our ISP. That took a week or so and we were connected yesterday and sos are part of the 255 of the population who can access FTTP. This has dropped from the original 93% for political reasons.
The old Telstra copper line with its noise and dreadfully slow speeds has gone and I am thankful that we were able to get off it, even though we had to buy a new modem, a new fibre phone, and a more expensive broadband plan to join the world of optic fibre cable. Now we will find out if Internode, our ISP, are sufficiently resourced to provide enough bandwidth to each user, or whether they are providing a small pool of bandwidth for a large customer base like Optus does. The latter chokes to a crawl when people are downloading Netflix.
Nice