Approved!

Yesterday my partner received a phone call from our friendly Telstra CEO escalation contact person who was very excited.

He had just come out of a meeting where a backhaul cable upgrade to our RIM was approved!

HURRRAHHH!

The upgrade should be completed by "end of April, start of May". My partner requested exact dates and these will be forthcoming next week. We are particularly encouraged by the fact that this is a hardware upgrade and not a software fix.

What does this mean? It means that if Telstra delivers on their promises, we should actually get the service we're paying for.

I am cautiously optomistic.

I really want to believe that it's going to happen, but until I see an unfettered 8mb connection and sustained latency of ~22ms across our gateway, I will remain skeptical.

We first experienced congestion symptoms towards the end of 2008 - sporadic periods of insane lag that tended to occur during peak times (after hours and weekends). It was over the Christmas/New Year of 2008/2009 that it became noticeably problematic and we opened the ticket with Internode on 18 January 2009.

Fast forward to 19 March 2010 and it looks like resolution might be on the horizon.

Stay tuned.