To be fair, we aren’t a straightforward upgrade to VDSL. We can’t afford any downtime during business hours to swap modems etc as our phones are all VoIP running over our existing ADSL connection.

But from a user’s point of view, it is just getting VDSL put on a spare phone line from a different company.

May 2011: We got the go ahead to take part in an ISP VDSL trial, however we would have to supply our own modem. So we got online and purchased a ZyXEL P-870H-51a V2 VDSL modem from the US. It took a few weeks to arrive, and by the time I got a NZ power supply for it, Telecom Wholesale were no longer letting people on the trial

9 September: ISP tweets:

VDSL is available! $50 add-on on top of our normal packages. ($55 naked DSL + $50 for VDSL – 5GB data. for example) 0800 276 232 T&C apply ^AL

15 September: Called ISP and went to place the VDSL order. Apparently VDSL is only available as Naked DSL so we have two options, get a new line installed for ~$350 or bring one of our existing lines over. Decide to bring one of our existing lines over because we have one that we aren’t really using, but for some reason it is showing up in the database as already having ADSL on it. Will confirm that it doesn’t and call back tomorrow!

16 September: I get someone on site to trace that line back to our demarc and verify it really doesn’t have ADSL. Tell ISP to go ahead with provisioning on that number. Find out later in the day that it is going to be lots quicker if we get CallPlus to relinquish the line first, then we can just get DSL activated on that pair.

21 September: The line gets relinquished, so we give ISP the nod to put through the order. Fingers crossed it isn’t far away now!

23 September: Got a call from ISP saying that Chorus have come back asking for $400 in wiring fees, because the line hasn’t previously had DSL on it. How does that work? Signing up for DSL on a line that hasn’t had it before doesn’t cost anything. So, I request that we sign up for ADSL and then we will just get that upgraded to VDSL. ISP confirms this should be fine, although it will take longer. Fine with me.

30th September: Chrous came around to install ADSL, all syncs fine.

5th October: Notified in form of a chorus visit that VDSL has been activated on the line! Plug in our VDSL modem only to find

It uses ~66W of power doing absolutely nothing.

66W * 24 hours * 365.2 days =  578 kWh / year

That is about $100 NZD of power per year (at a lean 17c/unit) without even cooking one packet of 2 minute noodles!

Shame on you Panasonic.

Next time in Shame on you, does the Sony EX520 series really only draw 0.2W in standby mode?

Here the ISP numbers start with 0867, so I thought why not create an outgoing dialing rule which doesn’t require an access code.

I created a rule with the access code 0, number beginning with 867, 8 digits long, and set it to forward the access code to the trunks. This works great, except my incoming dial plans no longer work! Instead of SIP calls going to the auto attendant, they just get a busy signal. The moment I remove my outgoing dialup internet rule it starts working again. Haven’t had time to find out the actual cause for this, but I’m guessing it is a gimmick because I was using the GUI to configure it.

I had been pulling my hair out with why auto attendant wasn’t working (I didn’t want to specify the SIP number in the auto attendant setup because we have several numbers that should terminate to the same AA) and rebuilt the system today, which is when I discovered what was causing the problems.

Logged onto one of the student PCs today and found a big PowerShell folder in the start menu.

Mind you, I would be suprised if they actually managed to do anything interesting with it.

The prerequisite installer was failing immediately when trying to setup the IIS role, giving the message ‘Configuration Error’. Initially I thought this was obviously a bug because it was beta software.

After reading through the system requirements document again carefully, I found that Sharepoint requires the Application Server role, which Web Edition does not have.

Installed Server 2008 R2 Standard and it went on immediately.

Here is a list of IT projects I’ll be likely working on for the next couple of months. Hopefully I’ll be able to cross most of them off.

• Refurbish our server room (done)
• Recable admin block (done)
• Consolidate / migrate 4 Windows 2003 physical servers to Windows 2008 R2 running in Hyper-V Core (done)
• Deploy a Cisco UC520 phone system test phase (done)
• Create a new Windows 7 deployment for 25 new staff computers (done)
• Switch over to using UC520 in production (final testing stage)
• Integrate the UC520 with Exchange 2010 (not needed)
• Get Caller ID integration going with ACT! 6.0 (done)
• Build a website in Silverstripe (cancelled)
• Finish the Greymouth Baptist Church website
• Find a job for 2010, or pursue self employment (done)
• And if I get time, write my DFSR monitoring tool Windows 2008 (R2?) has a more powerful monitoring tool built in, including propagation testing which is what I was planning on doing.
• Catch up with friends, family, beach, sun, lake, bike, garden (done)

Usually I would write this the other way around, and rave on for a bit then talk about my experience, but in the interests in not boring you too much I will skip to the review. Update: Because this post got far too long, I actually split into two posts.

My experience has been absolutely flawless, every call perfect quality, no dropped calls or degraded quality. I signed up for the $15/month personal plan, in which you get 500 minutes and two NZ numbers. I used one of my allocated numbers for an 0800 number, and signed up for a local Greymouth number, so I could call my parents without even using any of my minutes (“local” calls are free).

After a slight muddle with passwords when I first signed up (I hadn’t read the thing telling me not to put symbols in my passwords) I was up and running within 15 minutes, including the time to download a SIP client for Mac. I’m using X-Lite at the moment.

I called myself on the landline, to check out the delay (It is pretty bad usually when I do it with Skype), it was totally insignificant, much less delay than a call to a mobile. They have a very featured web control panel to help set up auto attendants, call forwarding, voicemail, you name it they have it – even wake up calls. Obviously if I was going to do it seriously I would buy a SIP phone so I didn’t have to have the software open on my computer.

I should mention that I have a fibre connection back to Snap which I get around 17Mbps up and down on, so I am not exactly trialling it on an average NZers connection. I’m hoping to give the service a try at work over the summer break, where I will move a few of the lines going into our PABX over to 2talk and see how it goes.

(My ping to sip.2talk.co.nz at the moment is ~18ms)

I would highly recommend giving this a try. I just signed up for a month to give it a go because it was so exciting, I won’t be keeping the service as I am a student so unfortunately can’t quite justify it.

I can’t help but thinking how great it would be if I went travelling overseas etc, get a nice phone with a SIP client and wifi, sign up with a local number in NZ, and call all I like for practically nothing.

Let me know how you get on!

Testing Blockquotes

It finally launched in New Zealand a few weeks ago, and I can’t keep away from it!

I think my best buy off it was probably the Chili Pepper’s Stadium Arcadium, which for $17.99 had the two CDs and a video of the making of their video, and a PDF of the booklet that would come with the hard copy of the CD.

My other more significant purchases include Bic Runga’s Birds, and I better not forget The Magic of Boney-M!

So being addicted to the iTunes store isn’t really the best, just after I signed my life away on my student loan, and accepted my enrollment offer at Canterbury University.

18 days to go, till I am off to Christchurch… Exciting! Of course most of those will be spent working; hopefully not the 12 hour days I have been doing recently though.

Thats me for now – I must go and order some prints from DigitalMax who are until Sunday doing 6×4 photo prints for a mere 15c ($0.15NZ) . That is stupidly cheap! Even when they are not on special they are generally between $0.20 and $0.23 each. So much cheaper than anywhere else in NZ will offer you!