Normal Blogging Will Resume Shortly…

Last time I wrote that I had a lot of stuff to catch up on with the resumption of broadband connectivity after the 5 week absence. This week was not a good time to achieve that catchup, because on Monday I decided to install Windows Vista on my home PC, and as a result have been busy all week getting everything reinstalled and configured. The PC is roughly four years old, a Celeron which originally had 512 MB of memory, increased last year to 1 GB and this week to 2 GB. RAM has nearly doubled in price in the last year, going from about $50 wholesale for 1 GB (DDR 400) to the current $90. In order to replace the router function of my ADSL modem, which had a built in DHCP server and so with a network switch could allow multiple PCs to be connected in a network, I bought a D-Link DVG-1402S, which is a VOIP router designed for cable use. This means its WAN interface is Ethernet, compared with the DSL-504T which Telecom sell to their users as it has a DSL interface. There isn’t actually an exact equivalent in DSL of the DVG-1402S, but you could connect one to a single port DSL modem, and in fact the DSL model is router and modem in one, which the 1402 actually isn’t, as it doesn’t replace the cable modem.

Apart from being able to service a small local computer network with its four LAN ports, the other significant function of this product is its VOIP capability. There are two ports on the rear for analogue phones which use the RJ12 connectors, and a cable is supplied for one. The main hurdle you face is working out how to configure it, if an ISP hasn’t supplied any details. Slingshot only supply a range of Dynalink, Grandstream and Linksys hardware so I wouldn’t expect them to know how to config this thing, so I didn’t bother them. I simply clicked options on the VOIP page of the router’s settings website until I found one lot that looked very much like the settings you put into X-Lite, and entered them. This in fact was the “User Agent” screen where username and password etc are entered. However in X-Lite you also have to enter the proxy address and in the D-Link this is on another screen called “Server Configuration”. I didn’t enter anything on the other screens and turned off “Provisioning” which is actually pre-configured for another provider. With that all done, reboot the router, and then wait for it to come back up, then pick up the phone… it all works!. So instead of buying a corded VOIP phone, or using the softphone with the computer on, I can use my existing Uniden cordless phone to make and answer calls on my old Telecom phone number. Great! (And I just finished a five minute conversation with someone who rang up, I was really startled to hear that phone ring for the first time in 6 weeks but it worked just like normal :)

There have been a few more things happening this week. IE8 came out and I installed it onto Vista here at home. But it was so slow that I switched over to Firefox, which I always used at home on XP, and will probably stick with that. At work it’s a little different: I use IE because it works better with our Microsoft servers’ various websites which use IWA etc so that you don’t have to enter a username and password. And that brings me to the work situation: we started sharing stuff around between different users on Exchange this week. It’s working very well; I’m sharing my calendar and tasks with my boss, and another couple of users are sharing calendars. So things are going well there. Things are also going well at home; I finally bought a clothes dryer (on Trademe) and it’ll be delivered tomorrow. I first looked at a full size one, but it would have taken up too much room, requiring me to move a lot of stuff around. The smaller one I’m getting won’t take as much stuff, but it will fit into the laundry as it is. Finally we had a positive meeting with the tenancy manager, and myself and my immediate neighbour will be maintaining our own gardens from now on; this means I can do some butterfly gardening without worrying about plants being pulled out or sprayed. And the very last thing (I know I said finally, but…) was that the gardener at school showed me nettle with admiral caterpillars feeding on it. The red admirals that I photographed on our bush last week haven’t been back, but I have had sightings of yellows most days. So I will be keeping a close eye on those nettles for the next week or two to see if any pupae hatch out.

I’ve created a new NZ Butterflies album on Picasaweb, and it will have more photos in it as time goes on. Some photos are going to be moved from other albums, of course. NZ doesn’t have that many species of its own, and probably the kahus are the most common, yet in this country they are much less common because people consider nettles a weed and pull them out. Monarchs are still great butterflies, but the smaller kahus are a lot more interesting for me because of their comparative rarity.

FOOTNOTE: The D-Link VOIP router is a bit expensive with a typical retail price of around $200. I got mine for about half that because of a supplier’s error (wrong price shown) but I wouldn’t have been prepared to pay the full price; there are cheaper products around. At the moment Slingshot, bless their cotton socks, is causing a bit more grief because the router is having a DNS problem when it tries to re-register with their VOIP server every so often. I have to check that out and see whether there is another setting I may have missed. I heard that Slingshot’s own DNS servers are pretty useless but Telstra’s seem to be able to resolve OK. We are likely to be getting VOIP as a new PBX system at work as well soon, so that should be interesting…

The Slingshot Experience Part 2

This was originally going to be a post about my experiences of switching my broadband from Telecom to Slingshot. I didn’t necessarily expect this to be plain sailing, as problems can occur any time, but I did expect to receive a broadband connection that functioned. Instead, the first post in this series ended up having to be posted from a work computer, and this post ended up being the first blogging I have done on my new TelstraClear connection. So what went wrong? Well, in fact, I don’t have any idea why Slingshot and Chorus were unable to provision a broadband service to my house. I just do know that I spent many hours on the phone over a period of about three weeks talking to the helpdesk. After that time I decided to investigate TelstraClear’s product offering because I live in the InHome cabled area. However, TCL’s record of the installation of cable in our area turned out to be incorrect, and I had to request a technician first come to the site to confirm that the little grey plastic box on the outside wall with Saturn on it did indicate cable at the address.

As it turned out, my chief objection to taking up TCL’s service in the first place, the cost of getting the cable into the house, didn’t really wash. Not only did Telecom charge me $99 to switch in the first place (to Slingshot), which would have paid most of the TCL cable charge, in fact TCL at present aren’t charging at all for connections, nor are they requiring minimum contract periods. So it would have been cheaper and less troublesome to go with TelstraClear in the first place. They also do offer an IMAP mail service which is one of the reasons I decided to dump Telecom in the first place, along with a host of other Xtra bugbears. It took me a week to check out TCL and cancel Slingshot’s services, and another week to book a technician to do the installation. On their HFC network, the modem that they supply is more or less an interface adapter to the cable and doesn’t have the useful features that most common Jetstream modems do, such as DHCP for connecting more than one PC. So I’ve ordered a D-Link router with a VOIP interface. The monthly fee on this plan is $55. That’s more than broadband added to a phone line, but as it is broadband without phone, it only costs me $10 to use Slingshot iTalk over it and I can keep my existing phone number. The VOIP router will let me plug in my existing phone and use iTalk without having to buy another phone, although I have successfully tested X-Lite over the TCL connection in the last couple of days, and have just used it to call Slingshot’s helpdesk.

So what happened? In summary

• Telecom took a week longer to switch me than Slingshot indicated.
• Bizarrely, I still had access to Telecom’s network for that week using my Slingshot modem with my SS login and password details programmed into it. The modem is obviously compatible with the ADSL service, but how it is that Telecom did not care about the difference in authentication, is very strange.
• Dynalink could not tell me how to use the modem diagnostics to determine where a problem might lie, unless I was actually working on the modem right there and then. I couldn’t do this because I didn’t have a working phone connection at home. Points lost for Dynalink support.
• Three weeks out, Chorus decided there must be a line fault and sent out a tech who indeed found something wrong with the line. Yet it was only a month or so ago that the last lot of repairs were made to the line. With the number of repairs that I have had done since I went on broadband, I wonder if my experience is unusual or if there are a lot of Telecom customers who experience repeated failures of their drop from the street.
• In the end, I could not get working broadband from Slingshot/Telecom. To their credit, SS have waived the usual cancellation charge, and are crediting me with some of what I paid, whilst I am returning the modem using a prepaid courier bag they sent out. At this time, though, I’m unsure whether I will get a full refund including the Telecom transfer charge.
• I remain a Slingshot customer on the iTalk service.
• I’m a TCL customer again – as I was several years ago (Paradise and Clear). I was on dialup then, and never accessed broadband anywhere else before now except for the past two years on Xtra.

The Slingshot Experience, Part 1

A month or two back I wrote that I was considering switching ISPs. I took the plunge mid-January and finally decided to change over. Firstly I went to Slingshot’s website and signed up there for Naked DSL, being assured that everything would be happening and they would send me texts to keep me up to date. After a week, I had heard nothing from them, and so made my first call to the helpdesk. For some reason, as it turned out, my application had not progressed in their systems. The calltaker got some more details off me and assured that a sales rep would call.

After another week went by and I had not heard from this rep, I called the desk again. This time, they said my broadband would switch over on the 4th of February. The guy on the other end had something like an Indian accent, and as is typically the case in such instances, was very hard to understand. Another week rolled by and along came the 4th of February. I took the new modem out of its box, connected it up, and it worked just as expected. Then I got onto the website and downloaded the X-Lite Softphone. But it couldn’t register. So it was time to call the helpdesk again. After a little more work, they changed something at their end and got the phone working. That was OK except that I didn’t have a mic at my end.

So, the next step was to borrow a headset from work, which it turned out was only recognised as an output device – the front panel mic jack wouldn’t recognise the mic when I plugged it in. Rather than muck around trying to connect it to the rear panel jack instead, I decided to wait a couple of days and buy a USB handset from Dick Smith Electronics (Cat. XH7170). When this was plugged in, it was recognised as both an input and output device. Should have been all set now, right? Not so. Because the broadband had died…

…I later found that Telecom had not switched me from their network until the 11th February, and that I continued to access their network between the 4th and 11th, even though I was using my Slingshot modem and account details. This in fact does not seem unusual. I have seen other modems running on the Telecom network with old invalid usernames and passwords, that don’t appear to be an issue. There is something odd when you can be connected to a DSL network without having to enter a valid username and password.

Getting back to the matter of the moment, I spent the next three weeks on the phone to Slingshot repeatedly as they tried to discover the cause of the connectivity problem. Later I discovered that I have never made a successful connection to their network. What has worked so far is the iTalk side, not in being able to make phone conversations through it, but in receiving voicemails as email messages to my Slingshot address (which also appears to work as expected). I have not got around to configuring any part of it except the email address to send these voicemails to.