Archive for March, 2007

VATSIM Oceanic 2007 convention in Melbourne!

Xplane

Make a note in your calendars… The 6th and 7th of October 2007 is the VATSIM. The event will be held at the Holiday Inn Melbourne Airport and I’m sure it will have a great schedule booked!

If you’re a flight sim nut, or even just an aviation buff, make sure you keep these dates free.

More info can be found on the events website.

Netgear DG834 followup

Computers

Well, it does look as though the Netgear DG834 modem is a fairly poor contender when it comes to sync speeds and throughput on ADSL2+ lines. The Billion 7300 modem that my ISP sent me outperforms the DG834 by nearly 1.5Mbit!

The DG834 came up with the following:

    ADSL1 (G.DMT):
    DownStream Connection Speed 5184 kbps
    UpStream Connection Speed 800 kbps

ADSL2+:

    DownStream Connection Speed 4969 kbps
    UpStream Connection Speed 810 kbps

The Billion 7300 seems to outclass the Netgear by a fair margin:

    ADSL1 (G.DMT):
    Upstream 800 kbps
    Downstream 6656 kbps

ADSL2+ (Annex A):

    Upstream 812 kbps
    Downstream 5390 kbps

ADSL2 (Annex A):

    Upstream 816 kbps
    Downstream 5338 kbps

Interestingly enough, both modems achieved a higher sync rate using ADSL1 spec than ADSL2 or ADSL2+. Looks like I’ll be staying in ADSL1 mode for quite some time :)

ADSL2+ and Netgear DG834 modems

Computers

I finally managed to get an ADSL2+ connection to my house! This has however caused lots of frustration in getting it to work! From my research, it looks like the Netgear DG834 modem does not like a lot of ADSL2+ lines.

I have one of these modems at a friends place and it seems to sync up using ADSL2+ and gets a nice 10Mbit connection. Mine however will not sync at all in ADSL2+ mode… It’s interesting that using ADSL1 (G.DMT), the modem will sync at ~5Mbit downstream – which is what I was expecting seeing as my Cisco router would report a max attainable line speed of around 5Mbit.

If I lock the Netgear DG834 to ADSL2+ mode, it will not sync at all. I talked to Netgear about this and they did the good old “it’s the ISPs fault” and didn’t really want to hear anything more. In the meantime, I’m getting my ISP (Spin Internet – I’d recommend them to anyone!) to send me a Billion 7300 modem which they say seems to have no issues.

Will be interesting to see if the Netgear DG834 modem is just no good at ADSL2+!