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We all have something we want to do, at least once, in our lives. This little guy follows his dream. It is an uplifting tale. It is only at the end you realise how much it all means to him, how long it took for him to achieve his goal and just how much hard work it was.

Kiwi!

Pony

I have just watched 36 Quai des Orfevres and was very impressed. It is better than Heat because it is more realistic. Whilst the movie is bleak in many ways, the underlying (albeit ambiguous) integrity of the main character is never in doubt. He is a good cop in a very dark world. Unlike Heat the main protagonists are both cops and the criminals are never shown in any positive light. Compared to Vrinks, Klein is evil, yet they both commit criminal acts for what they see as the greater good.

Embedded in the good is a bit of the dark.

Here is New Zealand we are experiencing the unleashing of broadband. In New Zealand, this means a bunch of truly awful advertisements on television and some tinkering with the ADSLnetwork infrastructure that Telecom New Zealand provides.

The outcome is not (currently) all that great:

Hi!

Well, it looks like my "unleashed" experience started last night (2006.10.27) at around 22.15 when my ADSL link dropped out and would not reconnect.

The router was trying to connect but the connection was not coming up due to "LCP no response". I strongly suspected that Telecom/Xtra were playing around at the far end and screwing things up in the process.

I contacted the XTRA Boradband Helpdesk and got the usual palming off. They walked me through the standard script:

+ reboot the router, or as they phrase it, "unplug the modem and leave it switched off for 10 seconds, then plug it back in".
- Guess what, same problem

+ then they check my username for this phone line.
- looks ok

+ next they look at "something" to see who is currently logged in
- this does not look good. apparently someone else is currently logged on my line. this is why I can't log in.

+ you appear to be using the wrong login
- no i am not. it is the same one that has been in this router for the last 18 months. i check anyway. the details are correct but the support "analyst" has now decided that

+ yes, your login details are wrong, you will need to reset your modem to its factory settings to get things working
- i don't think so. it has updated firmware and has worked without failure for the last 18 months. nothing has changed here. what has changed at your end? Could this have anything to do with your broadband upgrading?

+ no sir, it isn't that. the problem lies at your end. i have told you that we need to reset you modem to its factory setup.
- well, it does not look like that to me. it seems to me that the only variable we have here is the "upgrading" of the network. i do not believe it is my equipment. i believe it is your equipment. how can someone log in with a different name of my line anyway? I am on my physical line. how can this happen

[some small amount of silence]

+ we need to reset your modem
- no we do not. what we need to do is fix the problem at your end.

+ there is no problem at this end
- that is just ... wait a sec ... well, would you believe it. it has logged in now.

+ it's working?
- yes it is ... thanks ... bye

That conversation is somewhat abbreviated since it actually took 20 minutes on the phone plus another 6 waiting to speak to a human.

I am pretty sure that I was talking to an offshore call centre. The voice was definitely non-kiwi but the English was very good, so i suspect somewhere in India. I was also pretty sure that I heard someone else in the background that I spoke to last time; another Indian-accented English speaking voice.

Isn't it amazing how Telecom, a "communications" company is unable to communicate with its own customers and has to have some overseas company do that for them?

Now, down to brass tacks with regard to speed.

Prior to last night, I was able to regularly get 1.8Mbps download and 160-200kbps upload.

This morning, I see download speeds as low as 80kbps. The highest was 1.2Mbps. The average seems to be around 800kbps. I'm not even getting 1Mbps.

And upload speeds are currently a disgrace. The best I got was 130kbps; however, 90kbps seems to be the average.

I used NZDSL's Speedtest page (http://www.nzdsl.co.nz/module-Speedtest.phtml). I have used it for the last 6 months and trust it to do a good job.

This "upgrade" looks a lot more like a downgrade.

My router is saying that the line is set to 4.1Mbps up and 160kbps down. Yes, I have rebooted my router (last night, remember) and all I see is a vastly more crappy service today.

Yes, I know that Saturday morning is not the best of time to do speed measurements but this is getting silly. Not only are XTRA/TNZ downgrading me from my 10GB/2Mbps/192kbps plan to the Go Large plan (infinite usage, infinite download speed but only 128kbps upload); they are reducing my service and only giving me a 10 buck payback for doing so.

Frankly, these crappy speeds would tend to indicate that XTRA/TNZ IP network is severely congested and woefully under specified in terms of bandwidth provision and allocation.

That and TNZ's dropping of MessageLine is making me look to others for both my analogue and (now) digital calling. How the hell can giving less and charging more be called better?

Regards,

Gordon J Milne

p.s. I am also getting lots of timeouts whilst connecting to pop.gmail.com this morning. This is usually a solid-as-a-rock service but it seems flakey as hell this morning. What the hell are they doing @ XTRA HQ these days. Just counting the money? Don't they realise they have to "work" for it as well?

p.p.s. Has anyone actually been abler to talk to a real XTRA network engineer/specialist in recent times or is everyone being routed offshore to some call centre?

I sent this to the NZ ADSL list this morning.

I like the look of VOX. So, I will, over the next few weeks be moving my content from Blogger to VOX.

I wonder, Does w.bloggar work with VOX?