250 Megabit Internet at Home

Posted on October 27, 2020 by simonhackett

The Need For Speed

While nothing special in some other countries (like… New Zealand… let alone the USA), a better-than-100-Megabit Internet service at home has been an unattainable goal for me in the wilds of Adelaide, South Australia until now.

I have long had access to much faster speeds at the office, via path diverse gigabit fibre links that were installed back when I owned an Internet company, but not at home.

The companies who are giving the NBN a run for their money using fixed wireless services couldn’t help me, because I live in one of those leafy streets full of those tall things that leaves grow on. Our house has no radio line-of-sight to anywhere and no way to ‘fix’ that without the use of chainsaws. Not doing that.

Wait, but Why?

Why bother? To some extent this is for the same reason that I have a Tesla Model S P100D (Capable of accelerating from 0 to the open road speed limit in less than 2.3 seconds)… ‘Because’.

At least, that’s how I felt about it before I’d done it.

I have since found that there are some genuine benefits beyond mere geek bragging rights.

Our home is in the HFC network footprint. Back in December 2013 (!) I penned a blog post about how HFC (while definitely not as good as pure fibre) was still capable of speeds well over 100 Megabits per second, and definitely a dramatic improvement over (sigh) FTTN.

I don’t think I was expecting it to be a seven year wait (!) but at last, here in 2020, I have finally got there, via the very same HFC box pictured in that 2013 blog post.

To my great chagrin, I’ve not been able to obtain those > 100 Meg speeds with the ISP I founded, Internode. It seems that Internode is a prisoner of the the TPG group’s apparent disinterest in keeping up with state-of-the-art NBN home Internet speeds.

The fastest home Internet service currently offered by the TPG group companies is 100 Megabits, despite the release of higher fixed line speeds in the underlying network by NBNCo in May 2020.

This is a direct mirror of the long term TPG group decision to artificially constrain they speeds they offer on the NBN Fixed Wireless footprint, as I related recently. On the Fixed Wireless (FW) footprint, the fastest speeds being sold by Internode are 25 Megabits per second, despite NBNCo having offered Internet providers FW speeds of up to 75 megabits per second.

The TPG group have ignored higher speed options on fixed-wireless for more than two years so far (and yes, I have asked – repeatedly), so I have little optimism for the group to return to the forefront in fixed line speeds on the NBN in general any time soon.

Time to change providers. This was a decision I was sad about because, well, I did start Internode!

The changeover process on the NBN fixed line network is incredibly smooth and simple – such a contrast to the complicated realm that Internode and others had to navigate when it came to switching between ADSL2+ DSLAM networks.

Online signup took just a few minutes. A little later the same day I got an SMS to say that I had a 250 Megabit Internet service running with Aussie Broadband.

There was no physical change to anything. I simply got an SMS message to say it was done, and without even resetting or logging into the router, the world got…faster.

In fact, I was a bit shocked at how fast it was:

Over-achieving on a ‘250’ megabit Aussie Broadband service

I’m used to real-world download speeds being lower than the ‘advertised’ line rate, because that advertised raw data rate typically includes TCP/IP packet overheads. By contrast, this service is achieving noticeably more than the advertised speed(!).

It is also amazingly consistent. At 8pm I tried again and instead of a 274 megabit per second speedtest result, I managed a ‘mere’ 273 Megabits per second. Indeed I am yet to see a speedtest result below 250.

“Nice upstream speed, kid…gonna miss it after the upgrade?”

One thing I am a bit sad about, and it is not Aussie Broadband’s fault, is the NBNCo decision to speed constrain the upstream direction on the NBN ‘250’ services to a mere 25 megabits per second. The NBNCo 100M service has a 40M upstream, and the loss of that faster upstream (and that’s what I used to have) real does peeve me a bit.

In my view, constraining the upload speed artificially is akin to a gangster charging ‘protection money’. This level of asymmetry (10:1) is a bit unreasonable when all of the underlying backhaul/CVC/etc links are full duplex (i.e. same-speed-both-ways) data paths, so the upstream pipes are mostly full of ‘air’. At the same ratio as the 100M NBNCo service, there really should be a 100M uplink speed on this service.

Anyway – it is what it is, and in this regard I am merely a paying customer.

(My Aussie Broadband Refer-A-Friend Code is 4549606 if you feel like doing the same thing and if you’d like a $50 credit when you sign up 🙂 )

Does it matter – can you tell the difference?

It turns out that you can.

Web browsing of even content-rich sites is now visibly ‘snappier’, which isn’t earth-shattering, but it is very nice.

It is (of course) in the downloading of large chunks of data that the speed difference really comes to the fore.

I found myself downloading the latest Mac OS X release, Catalina, that weighs in at around 12.5 Gigabytes (!). I hit the ‘Download’ button on the Mac App Store and went off to make a cup of coffee, being used to this sort of thing taking a fair old while, even on a 100M link.

I came back to the Mac a little over 5 minutes later and it was fully downloaded and waiting for me to hit the ‘start’ button to do the upgrade. I had to get the calculator out to decide if that was even possible…and it is. The speeds I am achieving equate to more than 2 Gigabytes per minute of achieved payload data rate. Mercy Sakes that is quick.

Another few hundred gigabytes of Dropbox folders needed to be synchronised over the Internet link into that same Mac. Sure, that took a few hours, but again it was way faster than it had ever happened before. A few hundred gigabytes.

Overall – I’m really loving this.

There is just no sense of conflict in usage by different household members, even when a few household members are are streaming high bandwidth 4K HDR content at the same time (and…they really do).

Even while that Mac was chugging away in a corner, re-synchronising hundreds of Gigabytes of Dropbox folders onto its onboard SSD, the Internet service remained just lightning-fast for everyday tasks.

The Weakest Link

Back in the ADSL2+ days at Internode, we would often have to chase down apparent Internet link speed issues that really turned out to be local (in-house) issues with WiFi base stations or other in-house network issues – even at a mere 10-20 megabits per second. The state of the art in routers and wifi at the time was a lot worse than it is today.

By contrast, the 270 megabit per second down speed test results I am consistently obtaining with my shiny new Aussie Broadband service are being achieved to a laptop over WiFi on the kitchen table – not even using a wired network port (!).

I have tried again on a wired port, just to see if it was different and it was exactly the same. Somewhere between my glass-half-full blog post about HFC in 2013 and now, the rest of the home network technology concerned has comprehensively ‘caught up’.

For interest, the on-site data path is:

A Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X. This router is more than up to the speed task, rock solid and reliable, has automatic backup link failover, and the 5 port model I have at home comes in at under A$90. Incredible. This is a disruptive, excellent value device that is worthy of a separate review in its own right.
An old TP-Link rack-mount gigabit switch.
Multiple trusty Apple Airport Extreme base stations spread around the house, all connected on wired ethernet back to the central switch. Also well up to the task, but Apple don’t make ’em any more.
My (now) 3.5 year old MacBook Pro.

I’m intending to swap it all that out in a little while for a new set of Ubiquiti ‘UniFi’ series hardware (UDM-Pro, UniFi PoE switches and UniFi PoE Wireless Access Points).

I do not expect that change to create a speed gain. However, I deployed that full product set on our farm recently across a six site single mode fibre ring and – wow. That product set achieves everything on a complex site that used to take days of head-scratching with a Unix command line, and it turns it all into 10 minutes of point-and-click with a web browser. Again well deserving of a separate review sometime.

Conclusion

I am just loving the new 250 Megabit per second Internet service at home. Having spent most of my business career involved in the engineering of local, national and international many-gigabit-per-second networks, its nice to have something at home that – at last – feels like it is decently quick.

I’m hanging out for the full Gigabit service, though, on the happy day when NBNCo manage to get fibre down my street. Bring that on !

How to ignore a customer without even trying

Posted on October 22, 2020 by simonhackett

Today I experienced an ironic example of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) successfully avoiding any consideration of a well meaning (and simple!) suggestion to improve their offerings. It is ironic because the ISP concerned is Internode, the company I founded in 1991.

I meant well in trying to help them to improve their service offering, but all I wound up doing was falling down a funny / sad rabbit hole in terms of where those efforts landed me, as you will see.

I used what appeared to be the appropriate email address (found on this page):

This is what I sent (very lightly edited for additional clarity):

From: Simon Hackett

Subject: The absence of support for Fixed Wireless Plus is a strange
and unfortunate deficiency

Date: 17 October 2020 at 1:21:38 pm ACDT

To: customer-relations@internode.com.au

Hi guys,

I have a 25 Megabit fixed wireless service in Tasmania. 

This is the fastest Fixed Wireless offering available from
Internode/iiNet/TPG.

Fully appreciate this sheets home to TPG decisions on how the NBN
Fixed Wireless service is operated - but - NBNCo introduced a new,
higher speed/best effort (up to 75/10) Fixed Wireless service a
long time ago (December 2018!).

I have tried repeatedly since to get my service upgraded to
support those higher speeds, but I have confirmed (on multiple
occasions) with the sales team that there is no plan to have
Internode able to offer those higher speeds… which is just crazy,
frankly.

I think I’ve given Internode at least a year to fix this - and it
isn’t getting fixed - that much is clear. 

So - I’ve now given up and signed up with Aussie Broadband and as
of yesterday, I am indeed enjoying > 60 megabit per second
speeds on the same site with the same hardware and the performance
change is dramatic. 

I will call the accounts team on Monday to cancel down the old
Internode services at the site concerned (snbs client ID is
<REDACTED>, for reference).

As the person who founded Internode, I have found it hugely
disappointing - indeed actually upsetting - to have had to do
this… but (sincerely) this ball (in terms of supporting fixed
wireless customers) has been comprehensively dropped on a long
term basis by the TPG group. Supporting the now-current Fixed
Wireless service offering and rolling existing customers over to
it would be trivial. 

It beggars belief that this is not being done - but - well -
obviously it is not.

For the sake of not losing customers in Fixed Wireless over time
in this entirely avoidable manner, I would challenge you to
actually fix this. It won’t help me, any longer, but it would help
YOU (and your existing and future customers). 

Yours sincerely,
 Simon Hackett
 Founder, Internode

I got an email reply promptly back from iiNet (note: not from Internode), which said:

Hi Simon 

Would you mind providing your account number or mobile number for us to
assist you further.

Kind Regards
<REDACTED>
Case Manager 
iiNet Customer Relations

I pointed out in reply that I had in fact already provided this information.

What floored me is what came back next:

Hello Simon,

Thank you for your email and I do apologize for the delayed response.

Please contact internode directly via the following link: 
https://www.internode.on.net/contact/?dep=support

Their contact details are via the above website.

Warm Regards,

Customer Service Representative
iiNet Support



iiNet Limited, Locked bag 16, Cloisters Square WA 6850
ph: 13 22 58 fax: 1300 785 632
email: support@iinet.net.au
web: www.iinet.net.au

Um… excuse me?

Here’s the bottom line – I tried, but – having been taken on a complete runaround for my trouble, well, I’m outta there…

…and wondering why I gave them more than year to fail to address my original issue (as per my email above) before I left. Loyalty, I guess.

My Aussie Broadband ‘Refer-a-Friend’ code is 4549606 if you’re considering the same move, and it will get you (and me!) a $50 credit if you use it.

Thus far I’ve been highly impressed with the outcome, and I’ll have more to say about that later.

(Full Disclosure: I have also purchased some ASX:ABB shares after their recent IPO)

Three Days Soaring at The Vale – Day Three – Ridge Soaring

Posted on October 3, 2020 by simonhackett

Ridge soaring is perhaps the simplest soaring lift method to understand. If the ambient wind strikes a perpendicular obstacle (like a ridge line), the air has no choice but to go… up.

The 4000 foot Mount Roland, right beside the airfield, works really well for ridge soaring. The mountain is almost square, with sheer faces on the west, north and east sides. You can see this shape clearly on this Google Earth image of the local area:

(orange dotted lines show soarable ridge faces)

Annotated Google Earth image showing relevant features for soaring pilots

I’ve done a lot of ridge soaring on Mount Roland and on the ridge line extending immediately to the west, toward Mount Claude. However, until Day Three of this particular three day soaring exercise, I had never been over to the eastern ridge line – the Gog Range.

I took off and motored up in the Pipistrel Taurus Electro above the Gog Ranges, shut down the engine, and wafted down to the ridge line to give it a shot.

The wind was in the right direction but wasn’t very strong, so I couldn’t get much above ridge-top height, but I had no problems in maintaining that height, while flying end to end along the Gog Ranges ‘at will’, with an armchair view, watching the world go by 🙂

After a few passes back and forth along the full length of the ridge, I recorded a short video of the experience:

The beeping sound in the video is the sound of the “Audio Vario”. It is a good sound to hear when gliding.

The Audio Vario is a standard piece of gliding instrumentation that converts aircraft rate-of-climb into a tone sequence that becomes more urgent/higher pitched as the climb rate increases. The tone falls away entirely when you are not in lift. This sound lets a soaring pilot keep their eyes outside the cockpit, while using their ears to gauge their soaring performance.

The Gog Range is around 2500 feet high, and the terrain and the forest are really quite pretty. Ridge soaring really allows the opportunity to see it all ‘up close and personal’.

Interestingly, the Skysight ridge lift prediction (below) didn’t highlight the Gog Range, but it did show good ridge conditions on the edge of the Central Plateau itself – parallel and to the south of the Gog Range. It was that prediction that gave me the impetus to try the nearer, smaller Gog Range line.

The Central Plateau is a much higher, much more sheer, face – but it is also somewhat further away (with a long motor run back into wind to get home from it). That is something to try on another day.

Here is how the ridge looked, from the far (eastern) end, looking back toward Mount Roland in the distance:

First visit to the Gog Range in ridge conditions

This ridge flight in the Taurus Electro capped off three excellent days, experiencing three different weather systems and three different sorts of soaring technique, all in the same place.

What a wonderful spot to go gliding 🙂

Three Days Soaring at The Vale – Day Two – Soaring using Thermals

Posted on October 2, 2020 by simonhackett

Thermals are columns of rising hot air, driven by the sun differentially heating the ground. When there is sufficient moisture in the atmosphere, that rising air condenses at the top of the thermal to form a Cumulous cloud (or ‘Cu’).

Cumulous clouds are the classic fluffy white clouds often seen on a sunny day. These clouds showing a glider pilot the top of where a thermal is (or where it was – the lift under them tends to ‘cycle’ on and off over time).

Thermals can exist whether the Cu clouds are there as indicators of it or not. The gliding term for the Cu cloud right above you is a “Near Cu”. The term for the even better looking Cu Cloud that is just too far away to reach is a “Far Cu”.

Covering ground on a Thermal day involves circling slowly and tightly in the core of the rising air, gaining height, until the thermal starts to weaken. Then it is time to set sail for your intended destination, optimising your cruising performance by slowing down in lift and speeding up in ‘sink’ (a technique called ‘Dolphin Soaring’). If you get low again, it is time to find another thermal.

Australia is a great place to fly gliders in general. In the arid areas of the mainland it is possible to achieve quite spectacular soaring distances in the middle of summer. How far can you go? Just take a look at the current Australian Distance Records .

Back in Tasmania, on Day Two of Three, the wind had moderated and the day was several degrees warmer. The Skysight weather model indicated that there would be thermals in the middle of the day rising to 5500 feet or so, which is easily high enough to have a very fine time going gliding.

We set off in the Pipistrel Taurus Electro to explore those thermals and found that they were big, wide and gentle (not always the case!), and that the intermediate sink zones were also quite moderate.

Gabe and I wound up reaching around 6000 feet (very much in accordance with the prediction) over the very same valley that we had wave soared across the day before. The snow on the Central Plateau from the previous day had already started to melt.

We had a lovely time of it, just wafting about the neighbourhood, and the living was easy. Indeed, as is often the case on a good thermalling day – by late in the afternoon it seemed hard to go down 🙂

Here are some pictures from Day Two:

In the next post – on day three – I had a chance to use yet another soaring technique – Ridge Soaring.

Three Days Soaring at The Vale – Day One – Wave Soaring

Posted on October 1, 2020 by simonhackett

The Vale Airfield is a 1300m grass runway running parallel to the Dasher River in NorthWest Tasmania. It is situated only a couple of nautical miles from a beautiful mountain, Mount Roland.

This 4000ft granite beast dominates the local view all the way to the nearby town of Sheffield. It is part of a system of ridge systems that give way to the Tasmanian Central Plateau. The Plateau is a large, gorgeous and pristine alpine and lake region that includes the world famous Cradle Mountain national park.

Over the last several months, I’ve been using Pipistrel Taurus G2 electric self-launch motor glider to gradually (and carefully) explore this complex, fascinating, and beautiful area from the air, through a variety of weather conditions. The conclusion I’ve reached is that we are fortunate indeed, to have an airfield that is surely one of the best places in Tasmania to fly gliders.

There are many opportunities to go soaring here, using a wide variety of ‘lift’ mechanisms enabled by this fascinating and complex terrain – and to do it all year round!

What follows is a study in the successful use of the three major ways to sustain soaring flight in gliders, in flights were conducted over three successive days at The Vale, in three distinct weather systems.

Lets start with an annotated Google Earth image of the local area from the point of view of a soaring pilot (click image to enlarge) and then we’ll turn to Day One:

(The orange dotted lines are some of the local area ridge lines)

Map showing local geographic features — Many opportunities for soaring flight are driven by this complex geology

Day One: Mountain Lee Wave Soaring

One of the most wonderful ways to go soaring in a glider is the use of ‘Mountain Lee Waves’.

Wave (in this context) refers to a large standing-wave that forms in the atmosphere downstream (to the Lee) of a large physical feature (such as a mountain) in the presence of a strong and consistent wind that increases in strength with increasing height.

Mountain waves can extend into the sky to heights that are multiples of the height of the ground feature that triggers them. What forms in the air is an ‘echo’ of the shape of the ground feature, high up in the sky, with the into-wind side being a tide of rising air that can be surfed in a glider, to gain height.

Even better: If the wind keeps getting stronger with height, the primary wave system can act like another mountain! One wave can trigger another wave system, located further downwind and higher than the primary wave. This can keep happening, with multiple wave systems capable of ‘stacking up’ in a rising sequence.

Clouds can form in the middle of a wave system, appearing in a classic “Lenticular” shape, being quite literally ‘polished’ by the air rotating around the wave core. In the presence of multiple secondary waves, there can be a ‘stack’ of these lenticular clouds.

On the day we flew, there were no lenticular clouds to indicate the presence of the wave system… it was still there, but it was invisible.

However, I had another way to find the wave. I used a fabulous soaring pilots’ weather prediction application called Skysight.

Skysight has access to global, high accuracy weather forecasting data and it uses this data and a great deal of smart number-crunching to generate predictive, visual, forecasts for glider pilots. These forecasts help them to predict (with high accuracy in both space and time) the presence of various distinct sorts of weather systems that can be used to sustain soaring flight.

You can explore these images (generated by Skysight) to see what I mean:

The Skysight model for wave showed multiple significant wave zones at increasing heights

As per those images, the Skysight model showed the presence of a substantial primary wave system above 5000 feet, then extending through multiple secondary wave systems all the way up to over 20,000 feet (!).

It turns out that this wave system sets up quite frequently in Tasmania in the cooler months.

An impressive example of this happened back on 12th April 2020. This was not a day that I could fly (darn). Have a look (below) at just how impressive the wave system was, right across Tasmania. Lennies very much in evidence in the sky to go with it. A soaring pilot could have hopped from wave to wave, literally across the entire state.

Lenticular Wave Clouds over Mole Creek — Stacked Lenticular Clouds over Mole Creek

Lenticular Wave Clouds over Mole Creek (detail) — Stacked Lenticular Clouds over Mole Creek

Back to the present – and with my son Gabe as our photographer and co-pilot, it was time to see if the computer model was accurate in telling us that the wave was there, even though the indicator clouds were not.

To help us to find this quite invisible lift system, it was time to engage another piece of technology, the LX9000 soaring glass-cockpit system in my glider. The LX9000 is an incredible instrument. One of its plethora of features is the ability to import Skysight predictive map overlays directly onto the device for display in flight.

This means that I could fly the glider with the wave predictive model ‘on screen’, so we could fly under power up to the height and position needed to contact the wave system, and then shut down the motor and start playing.

We did precisely this. We climbed to about 5000 feet and flew to the edge of the predicted lift zone, and shut down the engine. As if by magic – there it was, and we just starting going up.

Here’s what the Skysight wave overlay looks like in the LX, in flight, in the aircraft. On the image, the lift zone is the yellow/orange/red zone on the map.

This photo was taken at a later point, when we had already climbed in wave up to over 9000 feet:

Successfully working the primary wave system with the Skysight predictive model overlaid on the LX9000

Wave lift is wonderful – it is a smooth, quiet journey of exploration, quietly working your way back and forth along the lift band.

Being a system driven entirely by wind, wave conditions can be (and mostly are) present in the depths of winter, when flat-land glider pilots have given up gliding for the season due to the lack of any useable thermals.

We flew the glider up and down the Mole Creek Valley on our climb, and wound up high over the edge of the Central Plateau. The Plateau was covered in a layer of snow from the previous night, and it looked rugged and wonderful.

Here’s are some images from the wave flight: