Streamyx dead AGAIN, DiGi never lets me down
November 8th, 2009 | by Sean |I’m enjoying ‘slowly loading pages’ at the moment. Streamyx has been completely dead since midnight yesterday night. It’s the usual thing – the DSL light is on on my router, so there’s a carrier signal, but the router’s log says:
Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Jan 1 18:14:42> Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
At least, that’s what the D-Link router says, my Caremo router (which I usually use, as the D-Link seems to have a fault on the ethernet ports) says
Couldn't get channel number: Transport endpoint is not connected
I’ve stopped serving a couple of sites from home, this time permanently. I moved my last couple of Works-In-Progress to a US server last night, the others have gone to servers in the UK. Living here is easy in some ways, but a significant handicap in others – Internet access probably the biggest example. We’ll probably leave late next year. I have mixed feelings about that, but there’s currently no credible sign things will improve here in the next 5 years.
DiGi
We use a DiGi EDGE USB adapter when Streamyx is bad. EDGE is a slower technology than DSL: peak transfer is something close to 26KB/s (so YouTube is not really bearable), and latency is high. It does allow us to keep working though, and in our experience, has been 100% reliable as a service. We have *cough*quite a few*cough* computers here, but the DiGi EDGE adapter is really meant to be used by just one. To reduce load on the DiGi connection, we run one old PC with the EDGE adapter in it as a gateway machine. It also has a squid proxy cache on it, so that when we look at the same pages, or download the same updates for Ubuntu, they’re served super-fast by our cache – the second time!
While I can’t recommend a DiGi EDGE (they do have 3G in some locations, just not where I am) connection to anybody who wants to watch movies online (or even look at big pictures!), if you want to get some work done (maintain some servers by SSH, check email, download software – overnight), you should definitely consider getting a DiGi EDGE connection – as a backup at very least. We downgraded our Streamyx connection to the minimum 512kbit/s package when we got our DiGi adapter. Just having it means we no longer suffer heart attacks and brain haemorrhages when Streamyx cuts out in the middle of a job!
– Update –
Our local TM technician, Fairil, told us on the phone today that there’s a dead piece of equipment in one of the cabinets here, and that lots of people are very angry. Surprise… What bothers me is that I when I reported this fault to TM, they didn’t appear to know there’s a fault – and I made my report 16 hours after the fault occurred! If our local guy knows, why doesn’t TM? Aaaaarrrggghhhhhh! Where is my phone call saying “re: your report, dead equipment, replacement in 2 days”? In the UK, I would have got flowers from my ISP by now!
That last bit probably isn’t true. In ten years of using Internet in the UK, my connection was out for 1 hour, once. And a man came from the ISP came to my house the day before to tell me it was going to be down. And it was cheaper than Streamyx. And faster. And the man in the ISP van was probably paid 5 times more than the TM man who never comes.
Why does it have to be so BAD?
2 Responses to “Streamyx dead AGAIN, DiGi never lets me down”
By LePanther on Feb 10, 2010 | Reply
First, my phone line went dead. This is the 2nd time. Called TMNet. Fixed the phone line but the Streamyx connection still dead. Called them again. They said a tech came to our house but no one was in. And left. Now it is the 5th day. No Internet connection. Still waiting for TM Net tech to come and fix. I paid RM66 for 24×7 access but get a 9-5 service. Now considering to get WiFi access as backup. Why it is so BAD? Because of mindset problem and all this protectionism policies and discrimination unwritten policies that our BN govt has been nurturing 41 years ago. 🙁
By Sean on Feb 10, 2010 | Reply
My line hasn’t been too bad for the last few months. There have been brief outages (and traffic to sites in the UK is terrible), but I’m hoping for no more several-day outages. I’m still using my DiGi EDGE adapter from time to time – it has saved me from TM-induced heart attack and brain haemorrhage several times!
If dependable Internet access is more important to you than speed-on-a-good-day, I thoroughly recommend DiGi’s EDGE mobile Internet. Just don’t expect to watch many YouTube videos.