More Telstra ADSL Troubles

We’re still having issues with the Telstra/BigPond ADSL at Mum’s place. I’d love to switch to another company, but there basically aren’t any good ones that service this area and any that did would be leasing the lines from Telstra anyway so it’d just add another layer to the tech-support nightmare. To add insult to injury, this entire area is nowhere to be found on the NBN rollout map. Australia really does have an abysmal broadband situation for regional users.

Finally tonight after spending several weeks trying to convince someone there’s a problem (exacerbated by the fact we’re not home much), finally tonight I get an answer that’s different from the usual “unplug it, plug it back in, reboot and try again” rort. Apparently the exchange is congested.

This internet has been acting up for at least a couple of months now - very likely to be four months. I’m sure we can’t be the only ones complaining if there’s enough users on there for it to be congested, but hang on a second…

… the Talbot exchange is congested? Talbot, a town of approximately 300 people according to Wikipedia, with probably at the most another 300 people in the surrounding area still serviced by the exchange. What do they have in there? Why are they over-provisioning their exchange to the point where HTTP requests don’t complete at all (completing slow we could live with, that’s what bandwidth management and heavy caching is for)? Would that explain the duplicate ICMP packets when you leave a ping test running for a while?

Something doesn’t smell right here.

Red Lion VIC 3371, Australia

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Red Lion VIC 3371, Australia

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