this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Finally made some real progress in getting connected to fibre - They started laying the micro-duct for it :)
Exciting! I can't remember the pre-fibre times, but I'm pretty sure they were dark times.
Golf clap
I still remember tying up our phone line all day to download Counter Strike over 56K.
Anyone remember when Telecom/Spark offered an unlimited ADSL plan around maybe 2010?? It didn’t last for very long, I was sad when they got rid of it and I had to go back to a 60Gb data cap.
We had a no internet before 9pm (in case someone wants to call) rule at home. Explaining to the kids what it was like in ancient times is really hard. How we couldn't just watch Bluey whenever we wanted. If we wanted to listen to music at a time we wanted, we used to have to record from the radio onto a cassette tape, and the DJ always talked over the start/end of the song. And later, we had CDs and would rip them onto a PC and then copy to an MP3 player. Or go on file sharing programmes (was it Limewire and something starting with K? The napster thing was all over by the time I caught up).
And how if we wanted to play music in the car we had this thing that went in the tape player with a cord coming out to play music from an MP3 player or discman.
These days with Spotify and bluetooth we just play whatever song we like whenever we like and it magically plays through the car speakers. It's normal to them but it still feels like magic to me 😆
Haha yeah come to think of it, I wonder how many phone calls my parents missed throughout the day when I'd leave the internet on to download something.
Yeah the kids don't understand rushing home to watch Dragonball Z or any other after school cartoons. And having to watch like 3 ad breaks in a 23 minute show.
No internet before 9PM is crazy! I used to tie up the line to play Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear or TFC online. You couldn't even do it sneakily because of the modem noise when connecting. Even MP3's took ages back then on 56K, when we finally got ADSL was like the transition from ADSL to fibre now.
My kids only know what ads are because we visit the grandparents, they love them lol.
My Auntie and Uncle had a second phone line for internet! Unfortunately they lived in another city, but my Auntie used to play Quake 2 online and introduced me to it. I remember being on a 56K modem and you'd often come across people on what I think they called a T1 connection? They would normally clean up. Hard to say if the faster connection helped them win or the more dedicated players would have the better connections, but I'm guessing a little of column A, a little of column B.
I don't really play twitch games or even online ones anymore, but over the years I've played the occasional game of Quake 3 for nostalgia's sake.
That sounds familiar. I think T1 lines were more common with businesses or universities, not sure how common they were in residential here? I was pretty young then so I would have had no clue. I do remember seeing those with much better ping than what I could get on our connection.
I don't have much time for online either nowadays. I still get the urge to try playing once in awhile and realise how terrible I am at shooters now 😅
Haha oh boy am I bad at shooters. Well, all games really. I play them on easy and treat them like an interactive movie.
Haha oh my god, bought be back to the days of having to pay (parents did the paying...) fees each month for going over the cap
Oh yeah, it was great when we transitioned to plans where you get slowed down once you're over the cap, but man was it painfully slow.
I always remembered the data cap cycle so on the last day you could just download overnight and blow over the cap as much as you could and it gets reset the next day.
Oh yeah! haha, that was definitely a thing. I remember getting nervous, wondering if I had the date correct, or if the plan would actually be rolling over exactly at midnight :)
You have to reset the router at about 11:45pm to make sure according to telecom/spark.
Source: I'm on one of those horrible plans right now. 60gb limit. Their estimate lags and then we suddenly overshoot and have to pay $5 or $10. It sucks.
I don't know what you're paying but it almost seems like getting an unlimited mobile plan and hotspotting your phone would be better. Unlimited plans can be had for about $40 a month, and they tend to allow hotspotting. It seems that the cheapest broadband plans are around this level, but then have you pay for a router which if it's on Spark is probably connecting to the mobile network anyway.
Of course the down side is you have to have your phone near whatever else you want to connect to the internet, and hotspotting will drain your battery. But then you will also not have to pay for a separate mobile plan. I feel like a spread sheet is in order to work out what's a good deal.
Interesting suggestion. Unfortunately decisions about shared utilities aren't mine to make, these days. I'm sure there are better plans out there.
Weird fact about the router though, it's a very old Vodafone one and when we set it up the one thing it would not let me change was the dns so it still uses Vodafone servers on a Spark plan!
Ah that's a shame. 60GB these days doesn't go a long way.
That is weird! I'm starting to remember how locked down routers used to be. These days we have quite a bit of control over what we can do with ISP routers. I can change DNS, do port forwarding of HTTP ports, etc.
Yeah that must be cool! Tech has just got so much better lately and there's so much cool stuff. I think if I had money and capability I would want to muck around with running stuff through a raspberry pi.
The Pi is cool but if you have a PC/laptop you can probably just run a VM for messing around. If you don't have a computer then the cost of the Pi is just the beginning, with the need for a keyboard and mouse, HDMI mini adapter, SD card (I just use the TV for the monitor when needed, plugging in with HDMI).
You can get a kit like this but, well, it's $200.
Honestly it's probably cheaper to get a VPS when OVH has their VPNs on sale for $2 a month for 12 months. But you'd probably need a PC to SSH to it (you can do it on mobile but it doesn't sound like fun).
Sorry to be ignorant but do VPS do ad blocking? I was daydreaming about a raspberry pi if I won lotto because a) I used to like trying to build my own computers and b) pi-hole to block ads for non tech savvy people in the house.
With a VPS it gets a bit more complicated, I probably wouldn't try to do pi-hole on a VPS though I think it would technically be possible. Regardless, I think your major blocker will be that you mentioned your router doesn't let you change the DNS server. pi-hole is a DNS server from the point of view of your router. You need to be able to change the DNS server for it to work. And if you can change your DNS server, then Adguard free plan might be an easier and cheaper (but less fun) way to get that.
I thought you might be able to pick up a really old Pi for cheap, I have pi-hole running on an original Raspberry Pi model B, but there aren't that many and even the ones that are there are more than I thought they would be (e.g. I can see a Pi 2 for $40).
People often use old laptops as a server, if you have one of those lying around.
Yes and no, I'm still using my 2014 laptop as, well, my laptop!
All this is super interesting. I'm filing it away in the back of my mind.
Haha it really has been the dark ages
Update: After all the horror stories I've seen online, Super happy (apart from the months it's taken to get to this point) with the exterior build work they've done.
Hopefully now it wont take too long to do the internal ONT Connection :)
Yay!
We went to look at a house we might buy on the weekend, and the exterior fibre cable pipe thing goes from the wall not straight down, but 20cm out into the path. In case you felt you weren't getting your money's worth out of ACC
On some jogs around the area, I've seen some shocking Fibre Installs. Saw one that had the black micro-duct that the fibre optic cable goes into just loosely wrapped around the power pole, and a few that had excess micro-duct just spaghettied, and tied to the middle of the pole.