TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

Mobile providers are stretching the ADSL market more strongly with plans designed to provide basic broadband services to users at prices that in some cases shatter ADSL prices. Vodafone apparently has new plans coming out soon which offer 5GB of data for $39 a month. The speeds of mobile services typically ranges from 512kbps to [...]

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A problem that is identified with Labor’s broadband plan is they plan to use FTTN technology. So, the government has chosen a technology to deploy. FTTN isn’t the best technology for providing services to users. In fact they might have chosen a technology that limits the service availability to those who decide not to get [...]

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There’s two key providers lined up to get involved on the bidding for FTTN. Those two are none other than Telstra, the company that expects a extremely high margin from what is essentially a VERY basic communications service, and the other company being G9, who are a consortium of companies specialising in providing network technologies, [...]

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At least on climate change. Kevin Rudd started work on Climate Change on Sunday, and we haven’t seen much follow on from there yet. However, he does seem keen to get some action happening, trying to bring together his government as quick as possible to start acting as quick as possible. No idea why he [...]

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What on earth happened over the last week? Not heavily packed, but packed none the less. Monday, we had to get my server back online, and change systems around, and set up my partners machine. That task carried over through Tuesday with software setup. The changeover was a smooth change, and turned out to be [...]

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The winner of this election isn’t the Coalition as originally anticipated (though I did indeed second guess Labor). The winner of this election definitely isn’t the Labor party. They didn’t win the election, they might have got voted in, but they most certainly didn’t win. The winners of the election are the Unions who spent [...]

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The argument presents itself every now and again that perhaps the government should work with Telstra. That’s partly a valid argument, I see a positive outcome from working with Telstra, the positives are good, it gets the infrastructure built and in a quick timeframe. But, theres a lot of disadvantages and negatives to quickly outweigh [...]

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Best news I have seen in a fair bit on the broadband scene. I could be getting ADSL2+ soon, although, the ISP that is the only ISP to announce it thus far to announce it, is none other than the lunatics at Netspace. Hopefully, this isn’t a Netspace only roll out (I highly doubt it), [...]

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That’s right. I did it. It took a fair while, but I finally did it. I went to the RTA today, and got my provisional license. There was no bribery involved. So it’s real. I do have my licence, and it only took 6 weeks to get it. It’s fantastic. No longer must I have [...]

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… Well, it’s not misleading is it. It’s coming. Saturday. Who to vote for is still the unanswerable question, for I am sure, many people, simply because there’s no real distinction between each party, mainly because it is dominated with me-too. Considering a vote for Kevin or a vote for John is going to yeild [...]

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The excellent part of having identical (or near identical) hardware is when something cops a nice drink of Sprite, you can simply swap the components over, and power it up and your good to go again. You can’t generally do that when swapping between say an Intel 865PE chipset, and an Intel P35 chipset, simply [...]

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Unfortunately (and its very unfortunate), the update I planned to release tonight isn’t going to go ahead as planned due to an issue with a particular provider. The particular provider issue wasn’t determined until just recently, but has been fixed. The reason for the delay? Well, I was investigating that issue and the time it [...]

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Recently, we had a item of hardware fail in my internal server (my in house server). Essentially that was just my older 2 year old machine, which unfortunately, had an accident. It wasn’t the servers fault however. Unfortunately, a Pop Top bottle filled with a bit of Sprite came into contact with the Zalman fan [...]

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News that the parents of child that starved to death now have warrants issued against them for Murder has surfaced. Which is shocking really, because the father seemed to maintain and protest his innocence. But if they truly were responsible for that (who lets a child get to that low weight in the first place?), [...]

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Today I took a practice test for the lead up to my visit to the RTA with the driving school I am with. Unfortunately, the test didn’t go so well, with just four fail items, and I had no idea why on earth I made them anyway. Fail item 1: Colliding with a vehicle, pedestrian [...]

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This election is a close one. A remarkably close one. Policies from both sides are both favourable and the result of gross incompetence. Unfortunately, picking the party that offers what a voter might want is TOUGH. Just 24 hours after I had come to a good stronger (not solid) decision to perhaps give KRudd my [...]

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It’s amazing. Out of all that Telstra do that is wrong, they actually (inadvertently) got something right. That is, the influence they tried to cause by making issues surrounding regulation political. Since doing that, they have continually bagged the current government, in an effort to influence the voters to vote Labor. And, they seem to [...]

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A new idea from the man of new ideas (sometimes unrealistic), Morris Iemma. “He who drives his car, in manner that reflects his small appendage, shall have his car taken away from him, and crashed and crushed at an RTA crash lab.”. Brilliant thinking Morris. Very brilliant. What do you think you will acheive here? [...]

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The election is just 12 days around the corner as I look at my watch and see the date is the 12th of November. The next 12 days in my opinion should show even more campaign toughness for my vote. I’m still undecided, though still Liberal supporting when I think of Labor with Telstra (who [...]

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I sometimes wonder why bother with a 50K limit if the slower speed is likely to cause people to rush to try and get places sooner. Would people be driving a lot faster if the speed limit was removed? Or are they feeling restricted by the speed limit and are just responding to restrictions in [...]

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Australia doesn’t have excessively poor broadband. By comparison, our quotas and limits protect the networks from being run to the bone by abusive users. Unfortunately, in the USA things during “Peak” time are known to be pretty packed out on Cable networks, that speed limits apply to services. In the US for example, a DSL [...]

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Next Generation Broadband was ADSL2+ and VDSL2. Next Next Generation Broadband will most likely be FTTN. Next Next Next Generation Broadband will almost certainly be FTTH. But what comes after that I hear you ask? (or do I?). Next, Next, Next, Next Generation Broadband. That’s right, after FTTH (if we go there), we could instead [...]

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Aside from the possible fines for not voting, I wanted to know the reason why people were voting for their chosen choice. Obviously I do estimate there are many who are still yet to form a firm decision, for a few reasons, one of which for me is that the policies of both the major [...]

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Sorry for the relatively harsh title, but nothing can really accurately reflect the news stories that have been seen over the last few weeks over what can only be described as negligence on multiple levels towards the care and safety of Australian Children. Let me just get some links here so you can get some [...]

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I think that in the light of the lack of alternative investment in backhaul from Telstra exchanges, and providers naming many exchanges as ‘too expensive’ to invest into, as a result of Telstra’s backhaul being unfairly priced. So to me, there is a lack of investment in backhaul, and the reason for that would at [...]

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Wednesday last week, a news story made its way to news.com.au, and that article described a situation, where two drivers, one male, the other female, were involved in an incident involving a lane charge. The situation got flared up, after the female chose to “flash her lights, stick her finger up”, which apparently was not [...]

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Today I spent a lot of time working on enhancing the status checker. Something I should have put time into a long time ago. A fair while back, I made some changes to the status monitoring program, but unfortunately, introduced a bug resulting in many outages being extended to the tune of 7 minutes (no, [...]

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Bigpond have advertisements that they run, and marketing campaigns that they run to attract customers. Unfortunately, they are generally misleading to consumers on many details. Some of these are: 1. 200Mb, failing to disclose just what exactly 200Mb is. Many users don’t know this, and besides, to be a fair comparison with the market, it [...]

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EFnet has announced today plans to begin a rollout of VDSL2, to 70 national exchanges in a partnership with PIPE networks. This is great news for anyone within 1.6KM of a exchange getting enabled, as they will have faster access to the internet (around 50-100Mbps, so you can nearly setup an ethernet suburb). I think [...]

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