Just when I thought I had my TPG ADSL2+ connection all set up, TPG cuts my upload speeds in half again! More on that in just a minute.

Following on from my earlier post about the NB9W hanging, I plugged the NB5Plus4 I borrowed and set it up in bridge mode, which means I disabled it’s router features and just ran it as if it was a standalone modem. I connected my existing wireless router, an old school Microsoft MN-500 I got years ago when I worked in the US, and everything connected. But, I was on a miserable 3700/256kbps. This was on last Wednesday.

I called the TPG helpdesk at their opening time of 8am sharp. The tech support guy listened, then put me on hold for 10 minutes. After that, he said check your modem again we have changed your profile on our side of things and now you should have better upload speeds. I checked and indeed it was true but when I started surfing the net it wasn’t stable. He got me to try pinging the tpg site and I kept getting timeouts.

He put me on hold again, and after another 10 minutes, he said the engineer tried a number of things but finally set me at 4000/512kbps as it was the most stable. He said it was probably something wrong with the Netcomm.

In the afternoon, it hit me. I should’ve just had everything run standalone on the Netcomm. Maybe my old Microsoft router didn’t know how to authenticate with TPG over ADSL2+. When I got home, I set everything up to run off the Netcomm, then the next day I called TPG again at 8am.

This time, the tech support person was a pleasent sounding female who asked me the typical questions from the support script. Do I have everything powered on, have I tried an isolation test, do I have any other devices sharing the line etc. I had shared the same line with my cordless phone and fax machine before, but for the purpose of the test I disconnected everything so the NB5Plus4 had the whole line to itself. I also played dumb about what happened the last time but unfortunately I made a fool of myself as she could see records of my call!

I complained about the upload speeds and she put me on hold while she got an engineer to do something on the TPG side. Basically, what I found out from the Whirlpool forums was that they tend to cap your speeds to ensure stability. Once the engineer changed my profile, my modem reported that I was running in ADSL2+ mode instead of G.DMT and guess what mum my speeds went up to 5000/1000kbps! My attentuation and snr figures were more decent too.

But I didn’t stop there. I hunted around the house to see where my Telstra phone line was at and found it at a very convenient location. I then discovered I only had 2 ports for that phone line in my house. I was able to do a true isolation test, having the phone line go directly to the DSL modem, and my speeds went up to 6500/1000kbps. It’s nothing compared to some of the speeds others are getting but it’s good enough for me.

I then decided to buy a new modem router of a different brand. Actually, the friends who loaned me their NB5Plus4 also had upgraded to TPG ADSL2+ and wanted their modem back so I was forced to start hunting. I heard good things about Speedtouch, but apparently their authentication mechanisms are not compatible with TPG. I then decided to go with the Dynalink RTA1025W. I picked that up as well as a central splitter from Cormain, and I recommend this retailer to anyone in the market for anything ADSL related. These guys know their stuff.

When I got home, I hooked everything up and it was all sweet. All was well, I was getting about 4800/1000kbps, but yesterday I found out TPG had once again dropped me to 512kps upstream and my modem was on G.DMT modulation. I tried forcing the modem to connect on ADSL2+ but it wouldn’t connect. A 8am phone call to their helpdesk this morning got it resolved, and I sit here wondering when and why TPG would drop me to 512kbps upstream again. Maybe there’s something on their system that detects if there are frequent disconnects and drops the speeds to ensure stability.