Something exciting happened a few months back: my local telephone exchange (or ‘Central Office’ for my American brothers and sisters) was upgraded to support ADSL 2+.

Actually, it had supported ADSL 2+ for some time, but only by Telstra resellers. When the Internet Service Provider iiNet came along, which runs its own back-haul network independent of Telstra, I committed to doing a number of things:

1. Upgrading my home internet from ADSL (supplied by Internet Service Provider aaNet)  to ADSL 2+ (supplied by iiNet),
2. Converting to Naked DSL;
3. Porting my telephone service from traditional PSTN to VoIP, and
4. Freeing myself from the expensive Telstra service and equipment fees and call costs.

Would this be an expensive exercise? Would I ultimately save money? Or would I pay more for the privilege (as I saw it) of being Telstra-free?

Now the dust has settled, it’s time to find out.

The Existing (Old) Setup

I have a small analogue PABX, with extensions cabled to most rooms in the house. This should neither detract from my internet story or cause any undue alarm.

Now, Mr & Mrs Dr Ron have had a common, garden-variety 19th-century analogue telephone line for many years. We only used this for incoming calls. Why? Because Telstra call costs are generally more expensive than… well, anything, really. So when someone called our home telephone number, all the phones in the house would ring and we would speak to the caller. I was on Telstra’s “Homeline Budget” plan, which is the cheapest line rental vs most expensive call rates, at $71.64 per quarter including “recurring costs” (about $23.88 /month). I was on this plan deliberately, to minimise the service and equipment fees, given that we didn’t use the service for outgoing calls. So far so good.

For outgoing calls, we had an account with engin, the VoIP telephone company. Engin offered 10 cent untimed calls to any number in Australia, (a third the cost of Telstra on the “Homeline Budget” plan,) and timed calls to mobiles and international numbers. My engin plan was like a mobile telephone “cap” and I paid at least $14.95 /month for the privilege.

So to make an outgoing call to a local or national number, we would “dial 0″ on an extension, and the PABX would pre-select the line connected to engin’s SIP voice box. We would get a “second dial tone” and make the call.

Now to keep down costs, I successfully trained Mrs Dr Ron to use her mobile telephone to make mobile-to-mobile calls. I did the same. I think calls to mobiles are always expensive on landlines and VoIP accounts, compared with mobile-to-mobile rates, especially when you can take advantage of “free 3 to 3″ and similar promotions run by other carriers.

My wife has a lot of family overseas, and we ring friends overseas too. Weekly calls to England, Scotland and Denmark are not uncommon. International rates on engin weren’t too bad and international rates on the mobiles weren’t too bad either.

The New Setup

We have kept the PABX: no change.

We’re still using mobile phones for mobile-to-mobile: no change.

We churned from the old ISP (aaNet) to the new ISP (iiNet).

We ported our telephone number, from Telstra PSTN to iiNet VoIP. This went surprisingly smoothly. We experienced a service outage for a few days, which was expected and clearly explained in the T’s & C’s provided by iiNet.

We cancelled the engin account, as it was no longer needed, and I got sick of their poor customer service (but that’s another story).

Incoming calls still arrive by dialling the same phone number, but these are now carried by iiNet VoIP into the PABX. (The iiNet router has anFXS port which drives an analogue trunk circuit on the PABX.) Similarly, outgoing calls are carried via iiNet VoIP instead of engin VoIP.

For richer or poorer?

Previously I was paying:

• Monthly Telstra bill: $23.88 + call costs, if any
• Monthly aaNet bill: $94.25 for 40 GB bandwidth
• Monthly engin bill: $14.95 + call costs not included in this cap, e.g. international calls

So previously I had a minimum monthly investment of $133.08 for home internet and telephone calls.

Remember I haven’t changed my call usage patterns, or the way I use my mobile telephone.

Now I’m paying:

• Monthly iiNet bill: $69.95 for 30GB peak/30GB off-peak + call costs not included in this cap

In addition to a financial windfall of $63.13 per month, I’m also ahead because:

• There’s no separate Telstra account;
• There’s no separate engin account;
• I’m using ADSL 2+ technology, better (albeit marginally, at my house) than first-generation ADSL;
• I’ve got half as much bandwidth again, compared with the previous internet plan;
• Unlimited, free, local and national telephone calls, as opposed to engin’s 10 cent calls which chipped-away at a “cap”; and
• VoIP quality is much better, for two reasons: (1) I’m on a faster network connection; and (2) my new router, provided by iiNet, has a Quality of Service feature which was missing in the old SIP box.

So Dr Ron wins. Faster, cheaper internet, and more cash towards that Mediterranean retirement villa.

Seriously though … that’s $756 /year in my pocket.

What have we learnt from this exercise?

Review your internet contract, and personal internet requirements, regularly.

Internet “plans” come and go, just as fast as mobile phone plans these days. If you stay on a plan for longer than 12 months, chances are that a faster, cheaper plan offering more bandwidth has become available, that might better suit your needs.

Shop around, and monitor consumer advocacy websites – like Broadband Choice in Australia – to compare “apples with apples”.

Happy hunting, good luck.  See you in the Med.

aaNet · ADSL · ADSL 2+ · engin · iiNet · naked DSL · SIP · telstra · voip

Moving parts.  When it comes to computers, they’re the bane of support personnel the world over.

Why?

Because moving parts fail.  They wear out.  Bearings in cooling fans get hot and seize, heads in hard disks seek and search, read and write for only so long, rubber belts perish and contacts in switches wear down over time.  That’s not to say that components like memory sticks and video cards don’t experience failure, but they’re not subject to the same type of failure that you see in mechanically complex components.

The answer?  Enter the latest phenomenon in personal computing: solid state drives, or “SSD” devices designed to replace old-fashioned hard disks in personal computers.

SSD’s have several advantages over hard disks.  They’re robust, and they’re not susceptible to drops, bumps, dust and environmental factors the same way that hard disks are.  They don’t need the same level of cooling.  And because there is no mechanical delay in reading/writing data, they’re noticeably faster than hard disk drives, especially on a heavily fragmented “disk”.

They are, however, still expensive when compared with traditional hard disks.  The current Wikipedia article on SSD’s suggests that they may be 10 times dearer than hard disks, on a cost per storage unit basis.

The Asus Eee PC 900A Netbook

This is one of the new-model Asus netbooks, designed for easy net access and mobile computing.  It was time to retire my old Acer TravelMate, and I’d been looking around for a replacement for some time.  I had been using an Acer Aspire 1 at Tech Talk for a few months, which has been graciously loaned to me on an ongoing weekly basis by my wife.

The main feature that appealed to me about the Asus Eee PC 900A was the 16 GB SSD.  Now 16 GB might not seem like much, with many personal computers being shipped these days with 320 GB or even 540 GB hard drives.  However, I considered my needs for the Asus: internet access on-the-go; web browsing, email, social networking; and maybe even video-streaming for the TTR webcam.  I don’t need heaps of data storage to do any of these things.  More and more these days I’m relying on online data storage through services like adrive.com, Zoho and Google’s Gmail.

Let me point out that this is not a replacement for my desktop computer, and wouldn’t be suitable for grunty applications like video editing, audio editing, Photoshopping (is that a word?) and other activities that do require plenty of disk space.

First impressions

The Asus Eee PC 900A is small.  It’s certainly much smaller than the boat-anchor TravelMate.  The Asus is equipped with a sharp 8.9″ LCD, a QWERTY keyboard to match and a track pad with a nice feel.  The left / right “mouse buttons” feel a bit plasticky but do the trick.  It has a built-in 300 kilopixel webcam, yep that’s just 0.3 megapixels, which is probably good for Skype video calling, or Yahoo Messenger, and that’s about it.  Actually it sounds worse than it is.

The 0.3 megapixel camera sounds worse than it actually is.

There are also 3 x USB ports, a VGA port, a 100BaseT ethernet port and audio in/out jacks on the left-hand side.  Connection to an 802.11b/g wireless network was quick and easy thanks to the inbuilt Atheros wireless adapter.

Four bright LEDs on the front-right of the Asus show power status, battery status, SSD access and wireless networking status.

What the Asus doesn’t have is Bluetooth connectivity, which may be an issue for some people with Bluetooth peripherals.  It’s not an issue for me however.

Also the Asus doesn’t have a DVD drive or mass-storage interface like a firewire port.  To install software, the current trend with these smaller netbooks is to install “over  the network”, via ethernet or wireless, or use installation packages on a USB memory stick or external hard disk.

Four bright LEDs show power status, battery status, SSD access and wireless networking status.

Performance

The Asus is equipped with an Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor.  With 1GB of RAM, and the nice fast 16 GB solid state disk drive, performance is very good.  It feels like a fast notebook, not a sluggish under-perforrming laptop.  The Windows XP operating system is responsive, quick to switch between applications and tasks and quick to start programs.  Booting from cold-start to a usable desktop takes about 30 seconds.  Windows shutdown with no applications running is faster still.

Shipping & Installation

I purchased the Asus from a home-electrical retailer in Melbourne.  It came pre-installed with Windows XP Home edition, pre-validated with Microsoft.  So if I wanted to save my XP Home licence and load an alternative operating system, too bad.  Hmmm.

The installation also shipped with an ASUS edition of Star Office 8, and the latest version of Skype.

Wireless networking was activated out-of-the-box and connected easily to my home wireless network.

The Asus is shipped with a power supply, a protective pouch, cleaning cloth, support CD and the usual Owner’s Manual and warranty information.

Conclusion

I’ve only been using the Asus for a few days.  But so far, I like what I see.

Many technology bloggers (like this one) have been critical of Asus and the seemingly confusing range of netbooks currently on the market.

My opinion is that the Asus Eee PC 900A fills a niche product hole and should sell well.  It’s a fast, light-weight performer utlising modern SSD technology and is ideal for professionals on-the-go.

Once it’s combined with a USB-style mobile broadband adapter on a competitive data plan, the Asus Eee PC 900A will be a useful tool for the modern-day “mobiley connected” professional.

900a · asus · eee pc · netbook

Is there money to be made from online market research surveys?

I was having this discussion a few days ago with a colleague, and thought I’d share a few observations.

On Tech Talk Radio in May (Episode 20-2007) I talked about two online survey organisations which I’d had dealings with.

The first, emailcash Australia, awards points to account holders. Points are accrued by clicking on sponsored links, participating in surveys and buying goods and services from Reward Partners. After you accrue a certain number of points, these can be redeemed for cash. For example, after accruing 3,000 points I was able to cash these points for $30.00. By providing your electronic transfer details to emailcash Australia, they put the money straight into your bank account of choice.

The second organisation, Pureprofile, awards real dollars to account holders. Again, money is accrued by clicking on sponsored links and answering surveys. You can log in at any time to see your balance, and once your balance is over a certain amount, you can have this transferred to a real-world bank account.

As it so happens, I opted to receive a $50.00 balance from Pureprofile just last week. It was quite a painless process and the money arrived in my bank account within a few days. Here’s a bank statement with a previous payment from Pureprofile:

Some observations about online market research organisations:

• Yes, believe it or not, they do actually pay!

• By logging in, answering surveys and clicking links every day, it’s taking me about 6 months to get a $50.00 payout from both organisations. Whether this is on-par, ahead or behind other users, I don’t really know.

• I’ve never actually had to buy anything in order to qualify to receive cash. Clicking on links and answering anonymous surveys is all that has been required.

• The most personal information I’ve been asked is my age, gender, postcode, employment status and marital status. I’ve never been asked my name or address in an anonymous survey. (From memory you are required to provide your name and some additional personal information when you setup an account.)

• I initially setup two independent email addresses, solely for use by the marketing organisations and for receiving mail and notifications. I’ve never received any unsolicited email to either address.

• Is 3 minutes a day, clicking on links, worth the pocket money? I’ll let you make your own decision. My advice would be, it’s good pocket money, but don’t give up your day job.

Dr Ron.

(p.s. I have no affiliation with, or interest in, either organisation, other than as a customer.)

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