Internet Newsletter 17

The main announcement is that the additional phone lines are finally in operation and we have increased the daily connect time during the peak (4.00 pm to 2.00 am) period from two to three hours; six hours off-peak. With the bonus time system operating you can stay connected even longer. Bonus hours come into play when your daily time allocation is reached. If there are modems available and unused at that point, you can stay connected until they are needed. During December 2001 a total of almost seven thousand bonus online hours were used. In December 2000 only four thousand bonus hours were used, illustrating the fact that many members are spending more time on the Internet.

There has been a small rearrangement of the phone lines. If your dialler is set to 9934 9400 and you receive a busy signal you may find it better to switch to 8626 5000 to avoid busy lines.

The other announcement is that we have purchased an additional 512 Kb of Internet capacity from a separate bulk provider, Comindico. This will have two advantages for members. The first and most obvious is that it will result in better response over the peak periods when our existing 2 Mb link saturates. The other benefit of having an additional supplier means that in the unlikely case of a major problem with our main supplier, Connect.com, we would still have a limited feed through the Comindico connection.

During the weekend of 8-9 December some members were unable to connect through 9934 9400. This bank of digital modems exhibited an unusual problem that allowed only some connections to get through. It took a considerable effort to find the cause and fix the problem. Although a message was put up on the MOTD this was of little help to the members who could not connect.

If that ever happens again, I would recommend you use another number to dial into a different bank of modems. The phone numbers are listed on page 2. To alter your number double-click on My Computer icon, then on the Dial-up networking and right-click on the Melb PC icon, select Properties and you will be able to change the number.

We have received a number of reports from users who have been disconnected after a short time. This was traced to a configuration problem in the new modems and has been fixed. However, at the time of writing there has been an instance when approximately 40 users on one bank of modems were all disconnected at the same instant. The preliminary indications are that this was caused by some problem at Telstra's exchange and it is still being investigated.

In a recent sale of ISP equipment we were successful in bidding for several Intel dual processor rack-mounted computers that we obtained at low cost. These will be used to replace our older computers that have been in operation 24 hours/day for four or more years. This should not only help with future reliability but also improve performance in several areas. Over the last year there has been a constant growth in the demand for data and services and we must keep upgrading our equipment in order to provide a good service to our members. Data growth is indicated by the graph at right that shows the average daily data supplied to Melb PC during the last year by our main wholesaler, Connect.com.

The green bar shows the incoming load and the blue line the outgoing data. The dip in the graph during February was caused by data coming from Eisa, who naturally no longer supply any data to us.

Reprinted from the February 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia