Fibre Broadband

I’ve finally gotten onto the snazzy next generation all fibre national broadband network. I’ve been waiting very patiently for quite some time. It hadn’t seemed like my home would be fibre-ready for a very long time. Then, surprisingly, came news about a year ago that things were moving along. But it was still many more months before OpenNet’s contractors came to pull fibre into my home.

Once the fibre was in, it would be at most another one to two months before commercial services could start rolling in. However, I was on a previous broadband contract. I thought I still had many more months of it left. Then, I had a pleasant surprise. I thought that previous contract was still relatively new, but it turned out it had just expired too!

So it was time for me to shop for a fibre broadband provider. Oh well, actually, there wasn’t much of a choice. It made most sense to go with a bundle, and there’s, you know, only one provider that has got a decent offering of cable TV channels. That was about the only sensible choice. The only choice is how much I wanted to pay for what type of fibre service from that provider.

Activating the new fibre service still took about three weeks. I’d have thought all the issues with slow provisioning would have been resolved. Well, I had been “behind the times” for so many years, what is a few more week’s of wait eh? I wanted patiently, and finally a couple of nights ago, everything was setup and ready.

I was so looking forward to LAN-like latency that I’ve heard so much about. Unfortunately, things were not that great. The latency over fibre was not significantly improved over DOCSIS cable. The D-Link wireless router provided with the plan was lousy. It’s a cheap router. There are a couple of features I need, and it’s not there. Yeah, I know some of you may say it’s free. Well, it’s a bundle, and there’s no specific line item for its price, but that doesn’t mean it’s free.

I think I’ll be much happier with pfSense. But I’ll still need a wireless AP.

I wasn’t impressed with the installer who came either. I suppose he’s doing his job. The provider, who shall not be named (but surely you can figure out…), had set certain operating procedures and the installer was just following through. First of all, he tells me that the wireless SSID cannot have underscores and numbers. Oh really?! Then, he suggests that I shouldn’t change the admin password on the router. Wow?! Also, that I shouldn’t change anything on the router apart from setting my preferred SSID and WPA2 password.

Alright, maybe only the last part makes sense for a users who know nuts about networking. But he could have tested waters to see what kind of “tech category” I fall into.

So the next thing I need to do is to put back a decent wireless router. Oh, the previous one just died. Yeah, quite a coincidence. It’s like they sense change, and they don’t like it, and they decide to call it quits.