Updated:- 4:30pm – Arriving back from a business trip overseas, I see Telstra have applied an update to their NextG (3G) wireless broadband system that has crippled Far North Queensland wireless broadband speeds.

The Symptoms

I arrived back from an overseas trip on Sunday. Wireless broadband performance was OK when I passed through Sydney, but flying into Cairns for an overnight stay I started noticing problems with slow connection speeds. My Bigpond Connection Manager had 5 bars of signal, but was extremely slow loading pages. (You know there is a problem when it takes over a minute to load Google’s home page.)

The speeds were so slow, many of the programs on my machine (such as email) failed to connect.

Trying to connect multiple times, I would occasionally get a fast connection for a few minutes, before it reverted back to the low data speed.

If I stayed connected continuously, the connection would occasionally speed up for a minute or so, and then slow back down again for a long period of time.

I did some testing using the speedtest.net site. My typical wireless download speed on a 7 Mbps (Mega bits per second) NextG wireless modem is 1-1.5 Mbps, occasionally getting up to 3 Mbps, but this new issue is causing speeds of 20-50 kbps speeds, (which is less than dial-up), and is crippling on a computer system. To the average user, this would give a similar experience to exceeding your monthly allowance, but slower.

Finally arriving at home in Port Douglas on Monday, I was having the same connection problems.

Further investigation has showed the same effect also happening with my iPhone 3GS.

Others Affected

Sitting in a local phone service business today to do some work using their high speed internet connection, 3 people have come in over the period of an hour complaining of slow speed problems on the NextG system. Several other people around town mentioned they have also experienced problems for the last 2 days.

The Problem

I first came across this problem with a computer system in remote central Victoria two months ago, and at the time put it down to signal issues, but now with three devices with different modems having problems it’s becoming obvious the source is a Telstra NextG system software update that is throttling speeds.

I expect the software update was first applied in Victoria, and has only recently been applied here.

Having seen this sort of thing happen before while working with cellular operators overseas, I thought it may be an issue with a software update (such as a HSPDA+ or database upgrade) being applied and effecting older modems (I use the Sierra Wireless AC875 wireless card, and my remote computer uses the blue Maxon BXP3-EXT modem), but that would not explain issues with the iPhone 3Gs.

The Solution

I have gone through the process of talking with Telstra technical support today. After many calls being diverted to the Philippines, I finally reached someone with some technical knowledge, and the issue has been escalated to level 3 support. I was informed the issue would be given a ticket number within 6 hours, and am waiting on an answer.

However, knowing the problem has been around for several months in Victoria (and is still there), I have little confidence in it being resolved any time soon.

A Bigpond wireless user for 3 years (without too many issues), I rely on the internet for business, but having no connection will eventually force me to change providers.

I searched around town today for an OPTUS modem, but they are all sold-out. (Not sure if the shortage is normal, or brought on by the current issue). Vodafone and Virgin Mobile modems were available, but they often piggy-back on the bigger networks in remote areas, so I would have seen no improvement.

Interesting other info

• While talking with an Australian based technical support person this morning, I mentioned being routed to the Philippines a number of times, and they had not been able to solve the problem. I was informed that all technical support for Telstra/Bigpond broadband is now provided from the Philippines. CEO David Thodey has been talking recently about Telstra’s poor customer service, saying how he wants to improve it, but I do not see how moving everything to the Philippines improves things. The quality of the VOIP connection used is typically very poor (ironic for a telecom company), and the different accents can be difficult to follow at times.
• I tried to do some system testing on using my iPhone in field test mode, but it looks like the latest Apple update has disabled the field test mode following the “antennagate” issues with the iPhone4. This stops the users looking at the actual signal strengths in dBm, therefore not being able to prove Apple wrong.
• Shortcut the convoluted Telstra telephone system by calling Technical Support directly on 133933.

The internet is a very different experience on a slow connection, as I was reminded when I ran over my wireless data allowance recently and was limited to 64 kbps. The art of optimizing page download speed seems to have been lost, but there is hope on the horizon.

The usage indicator on my BigPond wireless broadband account has been broken since November 2009. There is some kind of server problem accessing the information for my account. I have a request in with BigPond technical support to fix it, but in the meantime I am not able to tell how much data I have used.

Last month I ran over my 10GB allowance due to having to reinstall Abode Creative Suites and eLearning Suite twice. They did not load correctly the first time, and each reinstall came with an 850MB update download…..Ouch!!!….. It must be time for CS5 release.

For a few days my broadband speed was limited to 64kbps, and this makes the whole internet experience quite different. Having to sit and wait several minutes for pages to download, if they download at all, can be very trying on anyone’s patience.

I remember in the old days of website development, you would optimize the page to download in less than 30 seconds @56 kbps.

The art of optimizing page download speed seems to have been lost, and I put this down to several factors:-

• The increasing availability of broadband.
• Most of the web designers today are too young to remember 56kbps.
• Auto coding web development programs.
• Photo and video content not being optimized.

Working on a Slow Connection

Several reputable sites I visited took over 3 minutes to load a page, and in the end I gave up on them.

There are still a lot of people out there using slow connections in remote areas and other countries, and site designers not allowing for low data rates, they are losing customers.

One of the big surprises was social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. For a long time I had thought they were basic in design and kind of ugly looking, but on my slow connection they all loaded very fast. There has obviously been some thought put into these sites under the hood, and this could be part of the reason for their popularity worldwide…. other site designers should take a lesson from this.

Experimenting Back on Broadband

When I received my high speed connection back, I did several experiments with page download times, while paying close attention to the connection download meter.

One on the most telling results came from reading entries linked to Twitter. I normally check a day’s worth of Twitter messages at one time, and opened 20 linked pages. The total data usage for this was 70 MB…. That’s an average of 3.5 MB per page….

Some pages ran over 5MB, and one static text page with lots of flashing bits on the sidebar exceeded 7MB … How do these sites expect to retain viewers on slow connections with this kind of overhead??

I measured a plain text page on one of my own WordPress sites today using the Yslow plug-in for Firefox, and was surprised to see the PHP page was 425kB with 41 different http requests. The same page in HTML is 12kB. It’s nice to have these programs auto coding pages, but it comes at the price of download speed.

It’s very similar to when computer memory became cheap, and all the coding optimization skills were lost in software development.

Some Common Sense on the Horizon

I was listening to web professional Marc Fuller on the Camera Dojo podcast with Kerry Garrison the other day. It was very interesting what Marc had to say about website design, SEO and WordPress.

One point Marc mentioned was that in 2010 Google will be looking to focus on webpage download speeds, with fast loading pages benefiting more favorably in the page ranking algorithm.

We are also starting to see site caching become quite popular in software such as WordPress.

I hope these developments will get website designers thinking a bit more about visitor friendly layouts and designs, and dropping a few of the “data heavy” bells and whistles.

As they say…. LESS is MORE …

Additional Information:-

• Googles Matt Cutts Talks Caffeine and Site Speed
• Tools from Google and other developers, and start making your site & web apps faster.
• Articles on web performance. Discover best practices that can make your apps faster.