Monthly Archives: December 2007

Southern Cross Cable Damaged

Well ain’t this just a pain in the ass. Now I have to use Telstra‘s overloaded public proxy server (sydney.cache.telstra.net:3128)

Southern Cross Cable segment E has been damaged by a landslide on the land segment near Portland, Oregon. Cable repair crews are unable to start work due to extensive storm-induced flooding in the area. Their expectation is that work will commence during Dec 4, leading to an estimated restoration of service early Wednesday morning Australian time.
Quote: Internode Advisories

This cable connects most of Australia to the rest of the world. It appears that international traffic is completely affected at this stage.

Draytek Joins 802.11n (Draft) Club

I was looking at some of Draytek‘s CPE devices today and low and behold they have a new model on the horizon. The soon to be released Draytek Vigor 2820 Series is now offering 802.11n (Draft) capability. Plus as usual the plethora of high grade features I expect from Draytek.

While I personally consider Draytek to be a little lacking in longterm firmware support, they tend not to need it based on their devices just working well from day one. Did I mention the great features. e.g 32 VPN Tunnels, Easy configuration, WAN fail over, WAN load balancing, USB port for 3G mobile broadband Internet access and printer server, QOS.

Basically if you don’t want to spend the money on a Cisco devices, which will prob ably be overkill anyway, then Draytek are pretty damn good devices. Now yes you will say I use a Billion at home and all be it they are good devices, but Draytek blows it away on ease of configuration.

Telstra Marketing Spin

Just remember Telstra launched this wonderful thing called NextG, low and behold this is nothing but a marketing ploy for a name. Reality is that NextG is nothing but WCDMA 850Mhz (also refered to as UTMS 850Mhz)

Question is Telstra trying to push NextG as the replace ment for it’s CDMA network, and use the fact that NextG is actually a CDMA standard to bypass certain government requirements?