Off Topic: Telecom More Than Triples Far North XT Rural Download Speed
April 8th, 2011On 8 April, early AM hours NZ time, I noticed that my Telecom XT connection was running much faster than usual:
Rural Far North New Zealand Telecom XT Speeds
Woh. That’s interesting!
I’ve been using Telecom XT “out here” since November 2009 and the link was always throttled back to a maximum of 1.3 Mbits/sec up and down. Since this morning, I’m getting around 4.4Mbits/sec down with the same 1.3Mbits/sec up. That’s almost as fast as the cable modem connection I had back around 2003 in the U.S.! (That cable modem link is one of about three things I miss about the U.S.; Mexican food restaurants and Amazon free shipping are the other two.)
I’ve seen this type of speed (and much faster) over XT in urban areas, but never out here. Even with five bars and line of site to the tower, 1.3Mbits up/down was the max due to Telecom throttling the link.
I wonder if Telecom is experimenting with future configurations for the Rural Broadband Initiative…
The goal of the RBI is to allow 80% of rural households to have access to a 5Mbits/sec connection to the Internet. So, it’s an interesting coincidence that this thing is now running within 600kbits of the mark. I’m not sure what they have specified for the upstream minimum on for rural users, but I think it’s 1Mbit/sec.
I have some extremely cynical ideas about what’s happening here, and my guess is that the speed on this thing is going to be throttled back down again, but I’m just going to try to smell the roses for now.
Are you a rural XT user? Has your connection speed increased dramatically? I’d be curious to know.
Nice,that’s gotta be a real relief for you, considering where you were at with the pie-pan antennas a couple years ago 🙂
And I know what you mean about Mexican restaurants… sigh…
It’s working really well now.