Latest TPG ISP adventures
InternetSo we have TPG home internet. Yes they’re not great, but all Australian internet is terrible after you’ve grown up in Singapore.
(Good grief, I miss MaxOnline cable internet fiercely. Since moving back, they’ve even implemented their own NBN while our politicians and talking heads decry fibre is minimally beneficial. Ah Australia, always on the verge of greatness but never allowing yourself to do it).
TPG are generally decent during the day, but their evening speeds approach the ISDN connection we had when I was a kid. Check out our latest isolation test, performed with speedtest-py:
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from TPG Internet ([our IP address])... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by Vodafone Hutchison Australia (SD) (Sydney) [19.49 km]: 59.047 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 1.72 Mbits/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 0.28 Mbits/s
That’s fairly average. Between 19:00 and 22:00, its’ normal to see that dip below 0.80 Mb/s down. Worse still, their peering arrangements result in speeds for the major social networks that are so slow, my tethered iPhone with 2 bars of reception performs better.
As the “IT guy” in the house, I get blamed for this. Normally I’d resent being the face of such an issue, but given it’s this bad, I can’t say I blame them for their resentment.
The next step is to check the phone line, swap out the modem, run regular tests, graph the results, then move back overseas.
If these fail to turn up anything, we may attempt to cancel our plan, citing their terms of service which lists “900kb/s” as the minimum acceptable speed (which is in itself a joke). I would hope it wouldn’t come to that.
