Considering Vodafone RBI move in Waipara Valley

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Sideface

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#1282944 14-Apr-2015 14:02

grenow: Update: the install went very well. Nice guy from Downer, lots of signal up on the roof, so he wired everything up, and then... Speeds were dire. Worse than our old ADSL.

Turns out we're seeing the Greta Valley tower (at 45km range), not the Waipara Tower (at 14km), because the Waipara tower doesn't have an antenna facing our way. And the GV tower hasn't been RBI upgraded yet - if it ever will be. I think it is included in the RBI roll out, to judge by the Vodafone maps, but not in the next 12 months.

So we remain Conklined for the foreseeable future. I will explore other options. Who knows, maybe there's someone who wants to stick a gigabit wireless antenna up on the hills behind me.

I won't be holding my breath.

What a let-down.

Did you have to pay for the install or buy out of a contract?

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grenow

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#1282950 14-Apr-2015 14:10

It remains to be seen if we have to pay anything. The installer thought we might not... I guess there will be a phone call or email at some point.

coffeebaron

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#1283300 14-Apr-2015 21:57

grenow:
Turns out we're seeing the Greta Valley tower (at 45km range), not the Waipara Tower (at 14km), because the Waipara tower doesn't have an antenna facing our way. And the GV tower hasn't been RBI upgraded yet - if it ever will be. I think it is included in the RBI roll out, to judge by the Vodafone maps, but not in the next 12 months.

Did he signal test at ground level around the house for the Waipara Tower? You can often do a low or internal install to shield from the wrong tower. It is a real pain though that Vodafone have not enabled cell site locking in the router firmware as it would overcome this kind of issue.

I have same issue with a dominant cell site in the Waikato. The Omahine site (top of the Kaimai's) gives me the same issue. It was due to be RBI upgraded a couple of years ago originally, but still not upgraded. Spark now have a 4G site there, so if they decide to launch a rural broadband service, I know of a few customers who will jump ship.

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grenow

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#1283308 14-Apr-2015 22:17

The installer just checked up at roof level with the yagi and his laptop. Given it was struggling to get to 7ºC and blowing a good southerly I thought he did quite well... ;-)

The firmware fix sounds sensible. Shame it's not being done.

grenow

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#1373954 25-Aug-2015 15:40

Small update, for the interested: I have been talking to Amuri.net, and we spent a happy Friday morning last week prospecting the site for a solar-powered pole on top of Mt Brown (490 m - you can see a long, long way from up there). He's crunching numbers at the moment, but he should be able to deliver a 20+Mbps connection by hooking into his backhaul at Amberley, and at an affordable cost. Such is the frustration with the service off our Chorus roadside box that there are likely to be 6-10 customers for Amuri.net as soon as it's up there. With luck, it might happen in the next couple of months...

grenow

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#1437652 30-Nov-2015 10:11

Final update: we now have a pole on the hill behind us, delivering 20-30Mbps down, a bit less up (Amuri.net are tweaking the backhaul at the moment, because of a bottleneck in Amberley). There are going to be a lot of very happy people in our valley as they get hooked up. Compared with the 1.5Mbps we were getting over copper 6 months ago, this is paradise...

My thanks to Chris Roberts and his team at Amuri.net - great to work with them on a solution.

DarkShadow

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#1437773 30-Nov-2015 12:37

Cool, how much did this end up costing you?

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grenow

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#1437872 30-Nov-2015 14:23

Just Amuri.net's standard install fee, but I got 10 people to sign up for a connection, so that helped with their capital costs. As I said - they were very helpful and approachable - and the farmer who owns the hill was happy help in return for decent internet speeds... ;-)

grenow

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#1523462 31-Mar-2016 17:12

Final update: after a bit of backhaul and antenna tweaking, we now get 90 Mbps down and up. And there's an upgrade path...

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