There are some pointers to how to make optus cable work with linux,
www.cableusers.com is a good place to start.
In summary optus is really easy to connect to, make sure you have a recent
version of dhcclient and set the name paramter equal to your customer id for
the dhcp registration. (Under windows the only way to set the name sent at
registration is by setting the machine name, but fortunately that is not
true under linux). That is all that is required, you do not need to change
your hostname, you do not need to use the supplied card, you do not even
need to change anything much at all. There is no login since there is no
metering. Connection happily stays up 24x7.
Download speed. There has been a huge amount of grumbling about access
speed, packet loss and ping times. I can only give my experience, and
compare it to my experience on bigpond.
<RANT>
Yes I was a bigpond user, they changed the pricing to meter local traffic
and so I left. At the time I left they flaty refused to discusss pricing
policy and denied that there would ever be a fixed price version. As far as
I am concerned bigpond could not care less about customer satisfaction and
hell would have to freeze over twice before I ever go back to them.
Optus customer support is very willing but on the whole not much better at
resolving technical issues than bigpond. BUT they do talk to you, they do
respond to emails and so far if they say they will ring back they do. You
have to experience the black hole of bigpond customer support to understand
what a refreshing change this is.
</RANT>
In all honestly download speed on both services was quite acceptable. I
don't play online games so cannot compare the services for online games and
so on.
If I get less than 10Kbytes/second from any source I look to see if there is
a problem. Typically I get 20+kbytes per second per download from the US.
This depends on the server I am connecting to, and occasionally the time of
day, but otherwise no problem. If I do 5 downloads, I get 5x20kbytes/second.
>From fast sites, 100Kbytes per second plus is not unusual. There seems to be
some fundamental flaw with the optus proxy, and direct connections seem to
be faster, but others do not report the same issues. Also, some users seem
to get significantly worse behavious and it may depend on which optus router
you are on. The belrose router seems to be infamous in this respect. I am on
the aartarmon router and it just seems to work.
Local connections (i.e. close to optus backbone) seem faster on optus. I
used to get 200-300kbytes per second from bigpond and 300-350kbytes/second
on optus. Optus and bigpond has fast connections to mirror.aarnet.edu.au
which covers just about everything a linux user could want. I have
downloaded the Redhat 6.2 ISO on a Sunday afternoon (busy time I think) in
about 40 minutes from Optus which is about 270kbytes/second. I would never
have contemplated this on bigpond since they meter these downloads and at
24c/meg this would have cost $156.
Optus has a firm no server rule. This is clearly stated in the terms and
conditions and they mean it. They DO port scan users machines and they will
follow up if there is a server detected, often incorrectly. This is not to
everyone's liking but it is one of the things they are firm on.
Also, the uplink speed is limitted to 128kbits or (16 kbytes) per second.
This is the same as the new flat rate bigpond service, the metered bigpond
services is limitted to 50kbytes per second (well when I was a subscriber
anyway). The bigpond flat rate service is limitted to 50kbytes/second
download speed. I suspect for almost everything this is perfectly adequate,
unless of course you regulalry download 600meg+ files.
Optus has a section in their terms and conditions that indicates they will
look to throttle excessive usage. I have never hear anyone being notified of
this happening, but I don't look to hard. It appears that 1-2 gigabytes per
day does not trigger this rule, but there are no written guidlines.
On the whole I am very happy with the optus service. Your mileage may vary.
tim
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