CABLE!
Flat rate cable’s coming to town! Rejoice! Hopefully it’ll force Telstra to go flat rate too. Stole this off Rooshooters (this is one sweet deal). Of course I live in Camden. Whoop whoop. No cable. Not even Foxtel cable, much less Optus cable. Pay TV comes in via satellite. Makes the case for me moving up into civilisation and closer to uni more compelling :)
Hi There :)
I noticed by your posts @ Rooshooters that you are interested in Optus@Home cable internet. Here is some techincal info on the service you may be interested in which I found on the cable newsgroups:
– our modems (pre-DOCSIS standard) will NOT work with Optus@Home
– the launch is scheduled for December 99 (tv / radio / newspaper ads etc)
– The Optus cable network is capable of 30 megabits downstream (like BPA) and 10 megabits UPSTREAM (unlike BPA’s 768 kilobit upstream capacity).
– a good way to gauge if you can get optus cable internet is to see if you can get optus telephony over cable. This means your local cable setup can do bi-directional comms etc.
– NO LOGIN CLIENT REQUIRED. Yep, as long as your OS supports DHCP (BeOS / Linux / MVS / Unix / Windows / MacOS etc), you can use OPtus cable internet.
– You will only be allowed 3 IP addresses per modem.
– No address translation allowed on the client lan (this is to stop large lans from all sharing the same modem etc), but for <5 pcs, this will not be a problem with a simple firewall etc [his words, not mine]
– Up to 3 different pcs can use the internet at the same time (no extra charge for each pc login etc) unless going through said firewall etc..
– the usage plans offered will be used to specify how much upstream capacity you can use. Downstream will always be 10 megs though.
– Flat rate pricing structure (based on how much upstream capacity you want).
– Port 80 WWW & port 21 FTP will be proxied transparently, all other protocols will be unencumbered.
– NO INTRA-ROUTER blocks. You will be able to ping / communicate with anyone, no matter what router they are on etc.
– 5 email addresses as part of the deal.
– 5 megs of webspace for each email address (non-contiguous though – ie; 5 megs in 5 separate directories etc)Hope this of some use to you :)
Kind Regards,
Tim Harris
1:40am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
