Disqus - Latest Comments for zemm

Re: Hertz charges Tesla renter for more than $400 of petrol

zemm — Sun, 12 May 2024 04:31:57 -0000

Was it 60 Hertz?

Re: Someone tell Motorola NFC is an essential feature - Android Authority

zemm — Sat, 13 May 2023 20:17:35 -0000

Contactless is ubiquitous in Australia. In fact only one place I tried to use it couldn't accept it - an older parking structure that one would pay online but I needed to drive up, and it was upgraded recently anyway. I actually have a Moto G82 5G and pay most things using it. NFC was an absolute requirement for me. This phone replaced a Samsung A30 which was several years old and had it too.

Re: Optus wants gov response to OTTs 'free riding' on telco networks

zemm — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 07:33:24 -0000

But Optus and Telstra are already in the top most expensive providers in the world for content. Like that's why it's cheaper for CloudFlare to continue to force Australian traffic via Singapore or the USA (for their free customers) than to pay the exorbitant price

Re: T-Mobile 3G shutdown reportedly delayed until 2022

zemm — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 19:11:28 -0000

They will have gotten heaps of warnings. When Optus shut down 2G I was using an ancient 2G-only phone as an emergency backup and I got several messages regarding its imminent demise. Likewise my wife was using a phone that only could use certain 3G bands and when they were shutting off those bands she got messages. I think we even got a letter in the post too.

Re: T-Mobile 3G shutdown reportedly delayed until 2022

zemm — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 18:48:26 -0000

Exactly: 5 years ago Telstra in Australia shut down 2G and the other carriers here weren't far behind. They weren't the first in the world to do so. I don't believe it's still available in USA! 3G had been around for 15+ years and 4G (LTE) for 10, so there's no excuse not to have hardware that supports something newer. As far as I know a lot of the vending machines have an internal USB port so it's easy to swap out the cellular modem, just part of general maintenance.

Re: NBN Co to make HFC connections again from late July

zemm — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 07:03:53 -0000

I first joined HFC NBN 12 months ago, I'm on my 3rd HFC modem and they just sent a 4th. All replaced for no reason. Apparently the actual fault was somewhere in the network that they have finally fixed. I wonder how many NTDs were replaced for the same reasons?

Re: Optus to end dual-band 3G network support in April 2022

zemm — Sat, 01 May 2021 21:20:26 -0000

The newer standards allow more channels to be used at the same time, so it's not just for individual handsets having more data speed. For example, the original analogue mobile network used a whole channel for each direction of a conversation, it was basically your own FM radio station and receiver. 2G allowed three conversations to share one channel, making it more efficient and much harder to eavesdrop. Higher "G"s are more efficient again. This allows more people to concurrently use the available resources.

Using your car/bus analogy, older networks are like still trying to use a horse and carriage on a modern road. I don't care what you say, they work perfectly fine!

You can get 4G VoLTE candy bar style handsets so that's not a major problem for people who can't/won't use the features of a modern smartphone, though a pain having to replace something that still works after X years. Like, recently I found an ancient Nokia 3315 which still turns on and plays snake but there's no network.

At least 3G900 is going to be around for a while. If you didn't already have that in your phone with Optus you aren't going to have a good time! I'm surprised 3G2100 is still in use tbh.

Re: T-Mobile 3G shutdown reportedly delayed until 2022

zemm — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 08:06:47 -0000

Uh, do you understand what mmWave is? It's above 10GHz. The 2/3/4G networks all use specific bands in 700MHz through 3.5GHz. 5G can use those bands too but it won't be mmWave

Re: NBN Co opens instant quote generator for user-pays fibre upgrades

zemm — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 15:59:18 -0000

$ 26,247 inc. GST in Logan, Queensland to convert from HFC. Not worth it!

Re: Bandwidth Costs Around the World

zemm — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 01:46:45 -0000

it's only Telstra and Optus customers getting slow(er) service from Cloudflare, so Google won't see a difference in speed (should still be quicker because CF would serve static assets from a PoP close to them instead of having to reach over the Pacific). It absolutely uses local PoPs when using almost every other ISP. Everyone should just leave Telstra and Optus for internet for this reason! There's generally no reason to use them now that NBN has levelled the playing field. I know several people who want to move but don't want to change their email address!

That said, my company hosts thousands of sites in Sydney, via a Cloudflare Enterprise account. I'm not directly involved with the billing setup, but I have written a few workers and done some optimisation. My personal site uses free Cloudflare, but since it's hosted in the States I don't really care too much about its speed.

Re: NBN Co wireless tower loses power cable to saboteurs

zemm — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 02:18:36 -0000

To be fair to NBN, not every tower is congested. I don't have a big sample size but the one person I know on fixed wireless who I have spoken to recently is happy with it, performing much better than their previous ADSL and Telstra copper phone service.

Re: NBN Co makes final move to kill off 12Mbps broadband plans

zemm — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 08:22:01 -0000

Are you sure? There's a comment here saying that HD uses 0.5GB/hour, so two streams will only take up 2.5Mbps or 0.28MBps. I read that after I made my other comment in this thread.

Re: NBN Co makes final move to kill off 12Mbps broadband plans

zemm — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 08:15:07 -0000

Me, my wife and kids use YouTube and Roblox constantly on our 7Mbps ADSL 2+ between three computers, iPad and several phones. We don't generally notice slowdown: when it does happen even shutting everything down and using one device is slow so that points to congestion or line issues, not overuse on our part.

I looked it up and Netflix uses 1GB per hour, which is under 0.28MB/s, round to 2.5Mbps: two streams totally achievable. We can usually sustain just over 700KB/s. Of course HD might be pushing it since it uses about three times that. The kids don't care about SD. I only notice slower speed when working from home and need to download a 2GB database dump or build artifact or something!

Calling people idiots is a bit rough, and you might be overstating capabilities slightly, but I agree that 12Mbps a usable speed. However, it looks like unlimited 50Mbps will be about what I'm paying now (40 to TPG + 28 to Telstra might become 70-75 to "mystery RSP") and hopefully it's worth it. I'll be getting HFC so who knows when that'll happen! I know a lot of neighbours don't use the internet so hopefully that minimises local loop congestion.

Re: Bug Reports & Feedback: Notify Disqus of hacked account

zemm — Sun, 06 Jan 2019 02:46:26 -0000

> Because of this we immediately reset the passwords of all affected users, back in October 2017, and encouraged users to be cautious of using the same password across different accounts.

I was emailed my password in an extortion attempt. I just logged in using that password, so the quoted sentence is not correct! (I've now changed it)

Re: NBN Co finally reveals satellite users who will lose ADSL

zemm — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 06:57:35 -0000

A year later and it happened again...

Re: Aussie Broadband wants to stop buying extra IPv4 addresses

zemm — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 08:06:57 -0000

I started using NAT in 1998 with a Linux box sharing 33.6k dialup over a thinnet ethernet. Of course back then it was called "IP masquerade". This setup was actually against the terms of service of many ISPs!

Re: Aussie Broadband wants to stop buying extra IPv4 addresses

zemm — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 08:03:19 -0000

It means the "WAN" address on your CPE router will be a 10.x.x.x or 100.x.x.x IP address and not the address reported by those lookups. Mobile networks have been using CGNAT for years, and when you tether it is double NAT. Other RSPs are offering CGNAT addresses as well.

Re: TPG files proposals for almost one third of 4G network

zemm — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 03:12:03 -0000

You'd hardly notice these "towers". From my reading all the TPG sites will be "micro-sites" so will be a small antenna attached to a power or light pole, with a range of maybe 1km if they are lucky. Nothing like the massive antenna arrays you see the other three installing.

Re: NBN pillar goes missing

zemm — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 15:18:55 -0000

FTTP connection boxes are far smaller than the FTTN nodes, mostly because there's no active electronics inside them.

Re: Australians with fibre broadband connections double as DSL sinks

zemm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 18:26:56 -0000

I meant the graph shows 2 million "fibre" connection but the article says 1 million FTTP through NBN. So therefore, doing some basic maths, suggests there are 1 million connections through a FTTP network that is not NBN.

Re: http://aussieoutages.com/status/vodafone

zemm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 18:19:47 -0000

Seems to be a DNS issue between Vodafone and Incapsula at the moment. A lot of sites are on Incapsula so they are not working. But other sites are fine.

Re: Australians with fibre broadband connections double as DSL sinks

zemm — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 17:08:00 -0000

Fibre to the node/curb/basement is still a DSL connection - it's just the average copper length is reduced. So is there over 1 million non-NBN FTTP customers?

Re: NT govt spends 'millions' moving telco cables

zemm — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 01:51:05 -0000

They should relax some rules around placement but then make required they (Telstra, Optus, etc) move the infrastructure at their own expense when required in a reasonable timeframe, after which road developers could "move it for them" without penalty. They are getting rent-free use of public land so why should they get paid to maintain it?

Re: Ways to Enter BIOS in Toshiba Tecra / Satellite / Portege

zemm — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 04:15:09 -0000

The 0 (zero) key. Not the num pad one.

Re: iTWire - Kogan Agora 6 – first looks

zemm — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 17:43:13 -0000

I wonder how this phone compares to flagship phones of a few years ago? I still use a Nexus 4 since 2012. Keeping an ear to the ground in case I need to replace it. I would like to not go backwards in terms of performance. Does a 64 bit chip halve the effective RAM? What is GPS performance? Battery?

Don't care too much about network at the moment, but 4G would be handy since Vodafone shut down the 3G850 network!