By ABC's Norman Hermant Wednesday 18 March 2015
Photo: Thinking moving your internet service a few kilometres down the road is easy? Wrong. (Reuters)
I thought I had moved to West Footscray, not West Africa, but judging by my internet speeds I am not so sure. Who knew it was an internet wasteland just 9.5km from the Melbourne CBD, writes Norman Hermant.
I moved last month. From Kensington in Melbourne's inner-west to West Footscray, six kilometres further out in Melbourne's western suburbs. One might figure 6km, in a city of 4.4 million people, is not that big a deal. Wrong.
In internet terms, that 6km wound up being a move from Australia to Burkina Faso, in West Africa.
That's right. In my new house in West Footscray I am regularly recording a download internet speed of 1.5 megabits per second. That's the average download speed in Burkina Faso. The average Australian download speed according to net index.com is 16.93 Mbps - good for 59th in the world.
Here are two things to note about my new 195th world ranked internet speed. One - it didn't come easy. It took more than three weeks and numerous calls to my internet service provider to get online. And two - there is apparently nothing I can do about it. Possibly for years.
It unfolded like this. When we moved we also decided to change internet service providers - from BigPond to iiNet. After all, hadn't iiNet had those clever ads talking about how fast their internet was? So in the third week of February I called them up. Internet plus Fetch TV? No problem. Wrong.
Our new home is a small townhouse, one of those developments one sees all over in gentrifying neighbourhoods. Basically, one old house has been bulldozed and four townhouses have been squeezed onto the lot. It's a new house, so to get internet, we need a phone line. Now, iiNet can't put that line in itself. It sub-contracts to Telstra.
You want a new phone line? That can take up to 15 business days. Not 15 regular days. Business days. Once you've got your new phone line, it can take iiNet five days to turn on internet ADSL service. Are you doing the math? That 20 business days doesn't include weekends, of which there could be four. So you can wait 28 days - nearly a month - to get internet access in a new house. So there's that.
Then there are the issues with your location in the city. We're talking 9.5km from the CBD of Melbourne here, folks. Guess what. Our Telstra sub-contractor, Rosco, didn't like what he was seeing in the "pillar" near our house. Pillars are the last jump-off point for phone infrastructure. Pillars serve clusters of houses, and are connected to an exchange.
Rosco reported there were 100 "nodes", or places to connect a phone line, in our local pillar. 50 were free - and all of those were coming back as defective or unacceptable. "I'll connect you," he said. "I don't like your chances of getting good internet." Rosco was right.
The next challenge was getting my modem going. iiNet boasts they have 24/7 customer support. They do. But you often leave your name for a call back. On Saturday night, that call back was 2.5 hours in coming. When you do get your automated call back, you wait again for a real person. But at least they were able to get me online.
Then came the really bad news. After the first night of internet access, I had a sinking feeling all was not right. I ran a speed test. The results were bad. Burkina Faso bad. I screen saved a relatively speedy 1.68Mbps download result and tweeted iiNet.
"It's very likely a fault will need to be registered for this," they tweeted back ominously.
The next day I followed up.
"Uh oh," said the very patient iiNet support person. "It appears your distance to the exchange exceeds our theoretical operational distance."
That's right. In my street, the Telstra pillar is more than 4km from the closest exchange. "Anything more than 3km and we usually don't offer internet service," said iiNet.
But of course they don't really know this until they hook you up. In our case, our "top theoretical speed" is about 3Mbps. I was told I should be able to achieve more than 2Mbps if I connected a PC directly into the modem with a cable. But wireless? 1.5Mbps download was about it.
Now, just how slow is that? It's so slow that the iiNet person kindly explained that she would cancel my order for Fetch TV. The recording and internet TV device needs a download speed of at least 4Mbps to work properly, so it would be useless. She also agreed to waive my contract breakage fee for the internet service. "We probably shouldn't have connected you anyway," she said.
What about the future? Well, we can wait for NBN, but no one knows when that will be rolled out in our suburb. Maybe two years? I am also psyching myself up to perhaps change internet service providers again. A neighbour has Optus. Maybe that's a possibility.
In the meantime, I'll make do with my Burkina Faso internet. After a more than three week saga, I'm online like I'm in Ouagadougou. Oh to be back in Melbourne.
Norman Hermant is the ABC's social affairs correspondent.
My slow motion journey to truly awful internet - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
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