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[StarTech]

Yes our service providers will promise speed bump ups here but have yet to see it. I am supposed to be at 300 Mbps but rarely see anything over 50 Mbps. Now the neighbor just went Verizon cell service for internet and he is seeing over 300 Mbps yet his RoKu is buffering alot. Anyway as I said even 3 Mbps was fast for me when I went from 33.6 baud besides my router is limited to 100 Mbps. Not complaining about my speed as I download, surf, and live stream the RoKu device ( no buffering) without any noticeable speed reduction. Now of I just using HD mode on the Roku as my tv is only HD mode and not 4K.

We are suppose to be seeing upgrades but some of the providers are ignoring us in the countryside too Bert. Where I use to be located has been upgrading to fiber optics for the last year. But here the only thing happen is finally gotten a local cell tower and At&T has just basically abandon us for a service area. I might check into that service if they can still VOIP phone service so my multiple in house phone system still works but even with the tower in sight I still seeing signal drop outs on my customer's phones using the Verizon service at my place. Not worth it if I lose calls or don't even receive them. So stick with the service that works best for me.

And those data caps are a pain to deal with but just shows how limited the provider's service is to begin with. HughesNet Satellite service is promising 25 Mbps service but has a data caps so they slow to snail speed about mid month.

Either way we have learn work around to these problem causers.

There is some slow downs lately but it not local but net related some pages takes a time to load but I can open another tab and surf another site right a way.

 

[bertsmobile1]

In the countryside ?
No 75 Km from the Sydney Harbour Bridge 3 Km from the new International Airport and 4 Km from the major Sydney water supply dam that has had fibre to the door since 1975 .
The satelites that were supposed to be used for those in remote regions are oversubscribed from all of the users along the east coast .
We were supposed to get fibre to the door to every property that had a copper phone line along the east coat .
The modem racks removed for the phone exchanges were then to be repurposed in rural regions to give them Fibre to the Node ( mini exchanges on the side of the road ) and for regiona where there was no copper, satelite .
Australia had the first fully fibre phone network on the planet ( fibre connecting all of the phone exchanges ) and also the biggest fibre network on the planet when we just had the one government owned telephone company .
The it was decided that we needed "competition" so now we could get the benefits of competition like Donald Duck novelty phones
Originally the government owned telco was going to roll out fibre to the premsis because they had been running fiber backbone for 30 years and knew the cost savings and potential quality ( & speed imporvements ) then the conservative ( liberal party ) appointed directors vetoed the fibre roll out so the next government ( labour ) did it themselves and made the NBN ( National Broadband Network ) promising 100mbps to every premsis which could be upgraded as better softwear was rolled out to 100Gbps and indeed some businesses have 100Gbps fibre connections.

Now that government only lasted 1 term and the new ( liberal ) government trashed the original plan ( remember they vetoed the previous fibre roll out as well ) turned it into a pigs breakfast that cost 4 times the original estimate & delivered 1/4 of what was promised and blamed the previous administration.
Meanwhile , the new system, that included voice as well as www does not have sufficient band with so if it try to phone some one in Melbourne saturday or sunday afternoon when lots of the locals down there are live streaming the foot ball, I can not get through.
If they had a heart attack & their medi-alert tried to ring for an ambulance, it can not get a phone connection either

 

[smhardesty]

Our internet provider bumped us up from 350 mbps to 500 mbps, so I'm flying.. I can still remember ages ago having 'dial up'.. LOL Start PC, go eat breakfast, & come back to wait some more.

HAH! I laugh about that myself. I have 600 Mbps service now. They keep sending me emails, trying to get me to up my service to their 1Gbps service for only $15 a month more. There are exactly two people in this house and my wife doesn't get in the 'Net very much. I see no need for increasing the speed at this time.

And I would hate to hazard a guess at just how many times I would start a download right before I went to bed, hoping it would be done when I got up the next morning. I downloaded some BIG files back then, at least big at the time. It only took a couple of times where the download blew off, forcing me to start all over, before I found a software download manager that would pickup right where it blew off. Now, I download 2 to 3 GB Linux distributions while I take a drink of water. If it looks like the download is going to take more than 5 minutes, I'll cancel the download and try another mirror. LOL!

I'll never forget when I bought my first modem. It was a 300 bits per second device. Yes, only 300 bits/s. Once I finally managed to get the driver installed and working, I had no idea what to do next. LOL! Then came a real advancement over that 300 bits/s modem and I bought a 2,400 bit/s modem for asynchronous dial connections. WOW! I was finally able to connect to my first BBS. I was in heaven. LOL! How things have changed!

 

[smhardesty]

so you are better than 10 times over me
Download speed right now is 4.45 Mbps upload is 0.64
I some times think dial up is still with us .
This is our wonderful universal high speed broadband which in OZ was supposed to be universally available 100 Mbps , except for the 72,000 locations where it isn't

I get twice that speed if I use my mobile phone as a personal hot spot but of course I only can do that with the 3 Gb of total data / month .
We were supposed to get fibre to the door but as what usually happens in Australia, politicians come along and mess everything up so in the end it gets done 5 times at 50 times the price of doing it properly once.

I feel your pain with the government intervention. Back in the dial-up days I convinced an ISP from out of our area to offer service in our area. What we all had at the time was complete and total garbage. I knew a fellow that lived quite a ways south of me who had service with the outfit I eventually convinced to come into our area. He told me that he was actually getting close to 50k speeds on a 56k modem. He told me they had found a way to "clean the lines" and nearly everyone using their service was getting speeds like that. After a few phone calls I drove to their location and had a real heart to heart. They agreed that if I could get 250 signatures on a petition, they would do what they could to come into our area. Long story short, it happened. Then, because somebody at the old ISP that was losing business to the new outfit knew somebody in a position of authority with the State, the new company was forced out of the area. Some crap about phone companies not being allowed to infringe on the territory of another phone company. Bottom line was that everybody EXCEPT the old company lost out. It was a real crock, but nobody could do a thing about it.

 

[smhardesty]

And those data caps are a pain to deal with but just shows how limited the provider's service is to begin with.

I hated that data cap stuff myself. Since I use Linux, I am constantly downloading different distros to try out. I don't do it now as much as I once did, but I still try a couple new flavors each month. When we bought his house 6 1/2 years ago, I was able to get 300 Mbps service, but it had a data cap of 750 GB. We were constantly exceeding the cap and had to spend a few days each month at 5 Mbps. We use YouTubeTV for our television service and I was usually downloading a bunch of something, so we hit the cap regularly.

Then, several months ago, and completely out of the blue, I got an email with an offer I wasn't sure was legit. They were offering me 600 Mbps speeds, with NO data caps, and at a cost of $15 per month less than what we were already paying. I was extremely skeptical. I couldn't understand anybody offering me something better, for less money, without a catch. Turns out there was no catch. They did this because a competitor was all set to move into the territory with better service for less money. So, all they were doing was preempting a possible future exodus of customers. Worked for me! No need to change providers if the one I already have offers the same, or better, service for less money.

 

[smhardesty]

4 Km from the major Sydney water supply dam that has had fibre to the door since 1975 .

You mentioned that place had fiber to the door in 1975. Most people don't realize that fiber optic technology has been around for a LONG time. I don't recall the exact date, but some inventor or scientist back in the late 1800s actually experimented with what would eventually become fiber optic service. Then, in the 1930s, they really started improving fiber optic technology to coincide with the first commercially available television service. It only SEEMS like fiber is new because it was never available to the average Joe until more recently. But, I'm with you. Knowing that fiber has been around as long as it has, why isn't it already run to every doorstep, in every civilized country in the world already? I'm betting that if fiber was run to my own house, I'd have several choices of very high speed Internet service, at a much lower cost.

 

[bertsmobile1]

When we just had the one government owned telco Australia was the world leader in telecommunications .
The PMG had more patients than most of the universities.
When we laid the Sydney Brisbane co-axial cable it was the longest installation ever done
Then when we took it down to Melbourne again we broke all sorts of records for doing what the techs said was impossible .
We were the first to sent live TV down a wire , again it was that co-axial cable which carried all the phone calls between the major cities + live TV simultaneously , again "technically impossible " at the time .
We used to have delegation from all over the world ( including the USA) to see how we managed to do it and to train in out technology.
The observatories still could not get enough data through the network and that lead to the introduction of optical fibre .
The US defence force watched that very closely and the next roll out of optial fibre was to the 3 US spy stations and in particular Pine Gap as light down a tube can not be listened to by foreign operatives like voltage through a wire can be .
This quickly led to a fibre backbone so every phone exchange that used to have a copper wire connection was linked to each other by fibre, again the first country to do so and the largest fibre network on the planet as we had only one network that covered the entire country ( missed a bit in the middle ) .
Then we introduced competition that was not needed to improve the service which was recognised as being the most reliable on the planet .
SO the R & D got shut down as the emphasis went from the quality of the service to lowering the price to end users to be cheaper than the competition.
And as you would expect the competing telcos spend all their money in the biggest cities where they can extract the most profits and even on the fringe of the cities the service quality drops off to being a joke .
During the 2019 bushfires there were no phone service available and during the 2021/22 floods , again no phone so we were back to the 50's of relying on battery powered radios to recieve ( only ) emergency instructions with no way to contact the emergency services other than short wave, & CB radios .

 

[StarTech]

I remember those days back when skip was so good on 11 meters I could talk to fellows in Queensland using only a 1/4W (QRP mode) really pissed a guy off 25 miles away couldn't even do it with 3KW amplifier. I was in Alabama, USA at the time.

What was worst was when I got through his antenna backdoor that said no one could penetrate. He was complaining I was using an amp myself that day until kick on the 250 watt amp and bent his needles. <LOL that day here>

 

[smhardesty]

I remember those days back when skip was so good on 11 meters I could talk to fellows in Queensland using only a 1/4W (QRP mode) really pissed a guy off 25 miles away couldn't even do it with 3KW amplifier. I was in Alabama, USA at the time.

What was worst was when I got through his antenna backdoor that said no one could penetrate. He was complaining I was using an amp myself that day until kick on the 250 watt amp and bent his needles. <LOL that day here>

I haven't heard anybody refer to CB radios as 11 meter in a while. LOL! I remember those good old days too. Names like Teaberry, Moonraker and more come to mind. I had a set of beams that I would swing over the trailer park I lived in and turn the 1000 watt cooker on with the D104 mike. Tore the devil out of every TV and radio in the park. LOL! I can recall those days of whistling into the D104 saying, "Skip land, skip land, skip land. You got the one and only Rattlesnake on this end." Gee, I miss those days. LOL!

 

[StarTech]

That what bandpass filter were inventive for. My rakers and 4 watts was driving the neighbors crazy until I built a bandpass filter and then I could the 250 without any complaints. It is the CW that gives my problem currently as every pouch control goes it paces as I use the key.