Rubénerd!

So this afternoon my poor sister could receive messages on her Nokia smartphone, but not send them. We theorised it may have been a billing issue but ruled it out when she was able to successfully lodge a phone call. Or is it make a phone call? Phone a phone call? So what was the deal?

Deal spelled backwards is leaD

Now we all know phone networks in Australia suck. I remember a conversation with my Aussie IT teacher in Singapore who said Australia was a first world country with third would infrastructure. I corrected him and said the railways built to carry ore from mines to those giant ships bound for China are state of the art and the envy of the world, which he was forced to concede.

While I complain about Optus's poor coverage in our suburb that's less than 15 kilometres away from the CBD of Australia's largest and economically most important city however, its practically flawless compared to the reception my sister gets with her Vodafone fone. Wait, phone, damn it why do people make cutesy names with words spelled wrong on purpose? Like those dumb preschools and daycare centres that call themselves "skool" and the like. I always thought to myself: wouldn't that confuse kids with their spelling? Can you imagine a child failing a spelling test because they didn't spell school right, when right outside the window there's the dumb, incorrect spelling on the sign of the building they're in? Did they not think of that!?

Now, what we we talking about again? Oh yeah, how to get out of jury duty! The key is to tell the judge you're prejudiced against all races. That Simpsons joke do anything for you?

In Soviet Telcos, Vodaphones you, if there's a signal

There, I fixed the spelling. I hate people who intentionally misspell words. You're not clever. Sheesh, what a bunch of Rubénerds.

So what was the issue? Well it turns out the problems she was having with sending messages had nothing to do with her phone specifically, other than the fact it had a Vodaphone Red Sim™ in it; rather it was a nation-wide outage.

Judging from the furore on Twitter, it affected a great deal of people, with some suggesting they'd move carriers in a vein attempt to make a gigantic multinational corporation take notice and feel threatened. Ah the free market, its wonderful isn't it?

But I digress. According to their sstatus page which the Vodaphone ffolks referred to in their Twitter and Facebook aaccounts, the outage has been ffixed and service restored, maybe.

Users may have of experience ddifficulties in sending SMS. [...] We apologise to customers for the inconvenience.

Yes I was mocking them for their sspelling. A little rich coming from the Typo King I know, but the difference between me and them is they have billions in the bank, and I'm just one guy writing a blog. They have spelling economies of sscale you see.

C-C-C-Changes

So where does that leave us? As with the worldwide Vodaphone troubles in the United Kingdom, their eager support of the Egyptian internet blackout and troubles elsewhere... it doesn't look good. Perhaps their local operations here in Australia will improve now they've had a legal slap on the wrist, and maybe these planned and unplanned outages will go away.

In the meantime, they'd better get used to being the top trending topics in places like Sydney and Perth, for all the wrong reasons!

Funnily enough, I was with Vodafone briefly in 2008 in Adelaide and they were surprisingly good. Then again, NetSpace was supposed to be good back then too. And their logos both used red... coincidence much?

Optus have announced their own microcell (I can't bring myself to call these devices femtocells!) for sale in Sydney, Brisbane and a few places in between... to cries of outrage. I want one!

From Optus

It's simple to install, secure, gives you up to 5 bars of signal and is compatible with all Optus 3G phones and Optus 3G mobile broadband devices.

Only with the Optus 3G Home Zone can you get your own private and dedicated 3G coverage signal that you control.

Optus 3G Home Zone is the newest and simplest way to boost your wireless coverage around the home and office. It plugs directly into your fixed line broadband service and uses your broadband data allowance to connect up to four simultaneous users. In fact you have the choice of adding up to 12 Optus 3G phones and Optus 3G mobile broadband devices.

The Optus 3G Home Zone is available for as low as $60 on selected mobile rate plans of $79 or more. A range of other convenient payment options are also available on other plans.

Alternatively you can buy the Optus 3G Home Zone Device outright for $240.

New! Simple! Expensive!

Fix the network!

First up, its no secret that Optus has spotty coverage, particularly outside urban areas. No wait scratch that, even within urban areas, here in Earlwood we're less than 12 kilometres outside Australia's largest CBD, and the coverage is so woefully bad I estimate half my text messages don't get through.

It seems people are up in arms about this microcell precisely because they see it as a stop-gap measure and as a way to shift the burden of poor coverage on their customers. Its not our fault reception in your house sucks, you didn't buy our microcell!

There's probably some validity to those claims, and I don't like it on principal just as much as you guys, but practically speaking if it will allow me to make reliable phone calls and write text messages from home I'm willing to implement it. We all know how long networks take to roll out new infrastructure in this country... yeesh.

Good, but should be free

Microcells have been in use around the world a while now, particularly in the United States where phone reception in parts doesn't sound like its much better than here. Microcells also allow phone reception in areas where even traditional base towers can't reach, such as (un)intentional Faraday cages.

Optus claims they haven't done this before and that they'll be working out how to bill such a device as time goes on and they learn more. I would argue that a customer should be able to get one free if they demonstrate to Optus that their phone coverage is suboptimal... a networking term for crappy. I don't care how many terms of service papers wavering all rights I've signed, if I can't make a phone call on their network they've failed in their contractual obligations. It should be free, and the data it uses should be unmetered otherwise they're double dipping.

I used a Motorola L series with my Palm III in the day

Finally, I've had people ask me on Twitter why I wouldn't just use WiFi directly instead of getting a 3G microcell that would pipe through my existing internet connection anyway.

They've got a point, and certainly for data it doesn't make much sense, but if your problems are quality of phone calls and text messages, I can see it being really useful. This is the aspect of its operation that blustery reports from the likes of The Register conveniently ignored.

Funnily enough, some of us want to use our phones as... phones?

So here's something random, this afternoon I got an SMS from Optus, right?

OptusMSG: Important info: From 17 April 2011 we are changing the way that YouTube access appears on your bill. Visit optus.com.au/changes for more info

The link redirected me to an Earl that was so long it took several megabytes of my data plan to access. I kid, but it was long! If you didn't see it linked to earlier in this paragraph, here it is again.

I'll be addressing this message in three parts, which is one less than four but five greater than negative two. You read it here first, folks.

Ruben is highly-larious

Firstly, I just realised addressing and message is a huge pun, and it was entirely unintentional. Wait, I mean, it was intentional, and I'm a comic mastermind.

Secondly, according to Optus, YouTube videos are actually appearing on my bills! That's pretty clever. I don't understand why they would do this though, unless they were going to play ads with lots of zoo animals.

These jokes doing anything for you?

Department of Redundancy Department

Okay, down to what this post was going to be about. My point, and I do have one! Pencils have points, if they're well sharpened.

As far as I know, I haven't ever accessed YouTube content on my iTelephone 4 or my earlier iTelephone 3G on Optus. Never. Well, as a matter of disclosure, I haven't on my Motorola L Series or my Palm III either, but for another reason entirely. For the iTelephones, there are two reasons.

1. Their data speeds in the CBD of Sydney are exceptional (and now I know its not just me), but out in Earlwood where I live the speeds are so abhorrent it can barely send SMSs reliably let alone download a video file on the fly.

2. Even if their network did allow me to watch YouTube video as advertised (in video advertising, ironically enough), I also find it difficult enough to navigate across city streets, down escalators and in class with my face buried in my iTelephone's magical and revolutionary screen just when reading text. I imagine watching video on such a device would push my dexterity from crafty crowd weaver to head bump express, or worse.

I hope Optus isn't trying to kill me, because then I wouldn't be able to pay my bills. Where's the logic in that? But I digress.

This isn't the first time Optus has sent me an SMS about a feature or billing procedure that doesn't affect me (Optus and their redundant SMSs), but I suppose its better they have a few false positives than sending them to people who need the information.

So what was the message about?

After clicking through to that really long link, I was presented with this information. If you missed that link, here it is again.

From April 17th 2011 Optus will be correcting a technical issue, and any customers accessing YouTube [...]

Oooh! Wait! Let me guess! They've realised the terrible 3G data speeds and coverage around Earlwood is a technical issue and they're going to rectify the situation on the 17th of April?

From April 17th 2011 Optus will be correcting a technical issue, and any customers accessing YouTube will now see data usage appearing on their bills.

Ah crap. Oh well, at least I [involuntarily] don't access YouTube videos on my iTelephone devices anyway.

To be fair, after reading the whole page it looks as though they won't be looking for retroactive payments from people who have used YouTube on their handphones in the past. If they really took after their corporate overlords back in Singapore, they would ;).

After all my recent tweets on Optus's patchy service in Earlwood, it was interesting to see the Sydney Morning Herald's report on mobile phone data speeds around Sydney. I can confirm... some of it!

Hope the song was tasteful

The study tested the average time it takes for different phone networks to deliver a "three minute, three megabyte" song in various locations around Sydney. They "used iPhone 4 handsets provided by each of the networks for its research, and conducted multiple tests at each location."

The Sydney Morning Herald online editorial staff didn't deem it necessary to transcribe the tabular data from the crudely uploaded image in their article, but I spent five seconds putting it through my OCR software and came up with this:

Location	Telstra	Optus	Vodafone	3
Sydney CBD	9	8	21	23
North Sydney	6	13	13	48
Manly	6	4	10	55
Artamon	9	8	10	85
Epping	6	22	22	54
Parramatta	16	13	35	24
Baulkham Hills	29	15	22	57
Blacktown	6	90	8	111
Penrith	6	20	22	59
Liverpool	27	176	7	139
Bankstown	22	5	32	240
Ashfield	4	5	n/a	199
Newtown	5	24	19	164
Randwick	5	7	16	127

As an Optus customer, I can personally vouch for its above average rankings in the CBD. As long as I don't stray too far from the centre of Sydney, I get full 2G reception on my Palm Centro, full 3G reception on my iPhone 4 and surprisingly zippy data speeds even when the latter is being used as a tethered modem.

Unfortunately, this table also serves to demonstrate how spotty their coverage can be even just a few dozen kilometres from the centre of the largest city in Australia. For someone who's used to being in Singapore where I can get a full 3G signal in a lift shaft, this is quite jarring!

Jarring? I thought they used Pringles cantennas

Get it... jarring? Cans? Jars? See, not only was that joke terrible in its own right, but that photo I included above depicts Pringles cans that are of insufficient length (that's what SHE said) to create a long range cantenna, rendering my joke even less entertaining. But I digress.

Case in point with regards to spotty Pringles, I mean coverage: our suburb of Earlwood. Despite the surrounding Kingsgrove and Bardwell Park areas getting fairly average coverage, 3G data speeds are painfully slow, dropped calls are a regular occurrence, and at times both my Centro and iPhone 4 find it difficult to even locate a network signal!

A spokewomen for Optus who goes by the name of Simone Bergholcs was upbeat about the findings from this survey:

"Our overall network investment positions Optus as the only carrier capable of challenging the incumbent telco's network on both coverage and speed," a spokeswoman [for Optus], Simone Bergholcs, said.

I already said her name was Simone Bergholics, geez.

I would encourage her company to look at the study as as proof that while they're in an enviable position compared to their competition, they still have a lot of work to do! Australia's internet and phone networks are pretty poor compared to much of the developed (and even some of the developing) world, so its not as if saying you're better or as good as... crap... doesn't magically make you good. It makes you comparatively good. Like a boss. Or a can of Pringles.

I hope their SingTel masters use some of the profits they're generating to improve their subsidiary's network. Just saying!

On an unrelated note, I'm hungry.

According to the Federal Court of Australia registry website for tomorrow, the ACCC versus SingTel Optus case has advanced to a directions hearing... whatever that is.

The quote is the quotey quote quotey quotey

9:30 AM Directions

3 (P)NSD776/2010 BRIDGETTE REBECCA STYLES v CLAYTON UTZ

4 (P)NSD1157/2010 AUSTRALIAN COMPETITION & CONSUMER COMMISSION v SINGTEL OPTUS PTY LIMITED

5 (P)NSD1343/2009 RODMAC HOLDINGS PTY LTD & ANOR v ROTRIC HOLDINGS PTY LTD & ORS

Come again?

According to the Glossary of the Legal Services Commision of Rigel 7 website, a so called directions hearing is:

A hearing of directions

While arguably accurate, this description is entirely pointless. According to the far more useful Glossary of the Legal Services Commision of South Australia website, a directions hearing is:

[...] held before the full hearing so that the court or tribunal can give directions to the parties about how the action should proceed.

So, have we made any progress determining whether or not Optus intentionally mislead consumers with their unlimited advertising that I spoke tongue in cheek about last week?

Link arms, don't make them

• FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA, Tuesday, 2 November 2010
• Glossary of the Legal Services Commision of South Australia
• Simpsons Wikia on Rigel 7
• Rubenerd post: Optus Message #Fail

Dear Optus,

If you're not going to deliver all my phone messages to their intended recipients, whether it be from any of my current handsets, I expect to be compensated with a lower monthy rate. This seems fair.

Sincerely,
Ruben

PS: SingTel, please whip your boy into shape. And get him to stop with the "unlimited" advertising too, you might get into trouble for that with a four letter acronym.

Look out world, I'll be blogging more nonsense again!

This title is the bongly bongly deng diggy diggy

Having lived with tethered internet and one of those misleadingly titled Open Network dongles, this morning our new modem arrived. We connected it up and... we have DSL! After a two month hiatus, we've now returned to the 21st century.

Given our home line is with Optus we went with them for the DSL, but we paid a larger deposit (or whatever it was) so we're not locked into a contract. Our attempts to have service provisioned with Internode and TPG were fruitless, but mysteriously Optus had us online within two days.

Not knowing anything about Aussie telcos I can only assume they were able to pull strings that resellers couldn't, I don't know. Maybe I need to get a bloke called Andrew or Alex to explain this! In Singapore we always had direct cable so all this reseller stuff is foreign and weird and strange and all that.

Your strange national customs confuse me

Maybe we'll churn after this billing month (a term I just learned, makes it sound like your ISP has stomach problems), but for now we're just glad to have something! Once again I can blog nonsense on a more regular basis ^_^.

For those interested or who have nothing better to do, I first discussed the problems with provisioning internet at this address back on the 14th of September. We'd been trying since August.

Sometimes it isn't necessarily that we're not making any progress, but that the progress is proceeding at such an agonisingly slow rate that it seems like I'm not making progress even though I am making progress, it's just progressing progressively with very slow progress.

Moving is what a cow does

When we moved into our new house in Sydney we were told we'd have the phone line provisioned in 3-5 business days and DSL with Internode within another 7-10 days. My old man was horrified having got used to the Singapore way of doing things where new phone lines, internet connections and grilled cheese sandwich catapaults are automatically provisioned and installed on the same day you ask for them, but having been studying in Adelaide previously it was what I expected. Our tax dollars at work ;).

Uh oh, this cafe is full and a women wearing full gothic lolita costume has sat at the same table as me. And she has an iPhone 4! What do I do!? I'm not programmed for these situations! She has epic hair!

Turns out it wasn't that simple (surprise!) because our house and the house of our neighbour were until recently sitting on the same plot of land, which means [insert long convoluted phone line connection problems here].

It's like an unbreakable diamond tether!

When I got my fabulous new iTelephone 4 I was also told by the guys at Optus that I could use it for tethering. They were right, I just plug into MacTheKnife and he can be downloading emails for technical support questions they could look up on Google within minutes.

Two problems. First, in this new house I have a room for the computers and the signal is so poor in there it just doesn't work. Secondly, no matter where abouts in the house I am the connections are so unreliable I can barely sustain any connection at all without timing things out. Because I'm so security paranoid I have multi factor authentication with custom Yubikeys and the like on virtually everything, but it means by the time I log into things its already given up waiting for input! Oh yeah, and try running a FreeBSD portsnap on it ;).

The style is bongly bongle dongle dengy diggy

The (temporary) solution came last night when my father went to Hardley Normals and procured a Telstra NextG USB dongle broadband thingy, to lend myself the use of technical telecommunications parlance. They claimed it would take up to 24 hours to activate, but within an hour we confirmed it worked on our Macs without worries, and it even behaved itself on Fedora on my ThinkPad X40! I somehow think I'll have to work a little harder to make it operate on my Haiku box ;).

It's closed and evil and proprietary and black boxy and all that stuff, but for now it beats Optus tethering until we have proper broadband provisioned.

I had a dream a few nights ago about laying a Cat6 cable from our apartment in Singapore across the ocean floor to Sydney, then up through the Cooks River and across the street to our house. As with all dreams it made no sense, because I was able to detect a signal without any repeaters or anything, and I had a 6000 kilometre long ethernet cable.

You know what's interesting? Tethered internet. Here's a long story to read if you have nothing better to do.

Well, with an introduction like that!

For those interested, our house this morning just had the phone line connected, which means we can finally have ADSL provisioned. At least, given the state of Aussie telcos and ISPs we can never be too sure, but there you have it. So there are just nine more things to sort out before the end of the week. Easy!

Anyway during this time I've been using the tethered internet connection on my brand new, shiny iTelephone 4 which, ironically, I haven't been able to change the signal reception on no matter how I hold it. I plug it into the Mac, enable Tethering on the phone, and let her rip. Well, not literally, I had to sign up to another contract with Optus to get it so I don't want to cause it any damage.

The house reception issue

While certainly better than the reception we had at our family's friend's house in Normanhurst (the poor chaps), mobile phone reception at our new house here is also patchy at best. I'm a computer science student not an engineer, but I find it fascinating that a few centimetres of plasterboard can have such a dramatic effect on mobile performance, in some cases even making the difference between getting 2G and 3G reception. And it gets stranger, our kitchen area is an absolute dead zone, but the loungeroom which is separated from it without any walls at all gets several bars of 3G.

It's unfair to compare the gargantuan task of blanketing a country the size of Australia with decent phone reception with Singapore's compact, high density size and population, but the difference is amazing. I get 3G reception in lifts and emergency stairwells in Singapore, back here in Australia I can be walking in broad daylight and have a dropped call. Wait, I don't walk in broad daylight, the sun is evil, but you get my point.

Mmmm, pointy

Have you ever wondered why pencils are needed to be so sharp? I mean, the first thing you think of when you see a fragile, thin substance such as paper is lets put something really sharp up against it! Unless when people say "sharp" they're referring to intelligence, in which case I'm nervous that intelligent pencils could jump out and stab me. I mean, they're sharp!

Our first television at home was a Grundig, but we replaced it with a Sharp when the dial failed on it. I often wondered what it must be like to live in a country where to export your products you would need to name your companies in a foreign language. I wonder if businesses in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, oh heck the English speaking world, would be so successful internationally if they had to all be named in Africaans. The Dutch and South Africans would have all the huge conglomerates then, and we'd be bailing them out instead.

Consuming sounds like comestible. Wait, no it doesn't

While we're on the subject of malfunctioning robots (just keep taking pictures!) have you ever wondered why the sky is blue? I know it has to do with refraction of light, but that explains how it is blue. I'm not sure where I read that, but its been consuming my thoughts for weeks.

Thoughts that burrow into your head and refuse to budge like that are the closest thing we can come to Inception without using a team of architects, designers, pharmacists and a trippy thought connection machine that would make any Vulcan shake his or her head. Have you ever noticed how few female Vulcans there were on any Star Trek? And T'Pel doesn't count. Well okay she probably can count, otherwise she wouldn't be terribly smart.

I wonder if she was sharp.

That Sharp television we had was a strange beast. At times the picture would jump to the side and start jiggling around with flashes of primary colour and snow. No wait that wasn't that Sharp TV, that was my first computer monitor. The only high tech solution was to give it a small but firm smack on the side a few times. It would lurch, then correct itself.

Isn't it interesting how acronyms mean different things in different places? That computer monitor was an SPC brand from Taiwan, which in Singapore is also the acronym for an oil company, and in Australia they tin peaches.

Millions of peaches. Peaches for me. Millions of peaches.

Its so quiet here at night

Slumbers.

UPDATE: I thought I hit the Publish button last night, but I hit Draft instead. I have since corrected this obviously terrible mistake, though probably the difference was minor to the overall value of this site.

And if Optus had checked their records, they’d have seen I already did this and could have saved themselves the money of sending this message! Its funny sometimes to see companies ruled by indiscriminate computer systems that don’t have common sense programmed into them.