The last few weeks has seen an explosion of activity at Planet AusCam. A bundle of review items has appeared covering everything from USB and PC Tuner cards (just in time for the Olympics), the latest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking for Vista (complete with a Plantronics wireless headset) to various Windows CE based phones. Is it still called CE? No matter, none of them worked anyway and were sent back which was sad as I was looking to forward to playing with Next G under that platform as against by normal phone under the Motorola UI.

But the biggest excitement was the launch of ABC’s iView and our install of Foxtel’s IQ2 – the former for me and the latter for my wife, Sharon. She reckons the IQ makes me more bearable as when I interrupt her favourite shows – anything to do with either real estate or money – she can pause and then restart when I have finished. I like iView as I get to either re-watch programs I liked or play stuff I missed. I am an unashamed ABC junky for both radio and TV ... have you guessed that yet?
Strangely, these two separate incidences are related, in a bad way. Very bad. And it should never have happened.

You see, the first time I attempted to watch Q&A on iView it was impossible. Stuttery, dropped frames, little or no dialogue – in short hopeless.

I rang the ABC and was told that I needed a minimum of 1.1Mbps download to watch; no problem I have ADSL+2 at 1.6 average peaking at 2.2.

I called BigPond and they confirmed I had not exceeded my cap of 60GB and everything was fine.

Finally after almost a week of this, I isolated everything off my internal network, and simply had my laptop connected via cable (not wireless) direct to the modem and again checked the ABC site as it has a download meter (www.abc.net.au/iview). My jaw dropped. 18kps average, peaking at 30kps.

Why was I paying so much for crap connectivity? Had the Olympics put pressure on Big Pond’s servers? Was the modem faulty? Had someone tapped my wireless network despite full WPA security and a pretty damn good firewall at network level and individually at PC level?

None of these as it turned out. A very, very good tech at the end of the Big Pond Help Line picked it immediately. The installers who put the IQ2 box in had not put a filter on the phone line it requires. The same tech I found out had also diagnosed a fault where a shop that used gas bottles and had an auto system to phone the supplier when gas levels dropped also wasn’t filtered.

He’s good. Very good. I hope Big Pond has more like him and kudos where deserved. None at all to the techs who installed the IQ2. They should know better. They do this all day, every day, and a fair percentage of their clients have to be running ADSL. Was it just an oversight? I am not sure how it could be, as I would have thought there would be a check list. At least it is now fixed.

But if you ring Big Pond Help, and get to talk to Ryan, I reckon you’re lucky. Say hi! to him from me.

POSTSCRIPT: Just as I was posting this, the ABC popped up with a other initiative called ABC Earth, Check it out at www.abc.net.au/earth. Good old Aunty is certainly at the forefront of the technology revolution, leaving the rest in their dust!