To my intense amazement, it seems that NBN Co have finally done sufficient capacity expansion on our local fixed wireless tower to actually resolve the evening congestion issues we’ve been having for the past couple of years. Where previously we’d been getting 22-23Mbps during the day and more like 2-3Mbps (or worse) during the evenings, we’re now back to 22-23Mbps all the time, and the status lights on the NTD remain a pleasing green, rather than alternating between green and amber. This is how things were way back at the start, six years ago.

We received an email from iiNet in early July advising us of the pending improvements. It said:

Your NBN™ Wireless service offers maximum internet speeds of 25Mbps downland and 5Mbps upload.

NBN Co have identified that your service is connected to a Wireless cell that is currently experiencing congestion, with estimated typical evening speeds of 3~6 Mbps. This congestion means that activities like browsing, streaming or gaming might have been and could continue to be slower than promised, especially when multiple people or devices are using the internet at the same time.

NBN Co estimates that capacity upgrades to improve the speed congestion will be completed by Dec-19.

At the time we were given the option of moving to a lower speed plan with a $10 refund because we weren’t getting the advertised speed, or to wait it out on our current plan. We chose the latter, because if we’d downgraded, that would have reduced our speed during the day, when everything was otherwise fine.

We did not receive any notification from iiNet of exactly when works would commence, nor was I ever able to find any indication of planned maintenance on iiNet’s status page. Instead, I’ve come to rely on notifications from my neighbour, who’s with activ8me. He receives helpful emails like this:

This is a courtesy email from Activ8me, Letting you know NBN will be performing Fixed Wireless Network capacity work in your area that might affect your connectivity to the internet. This activity is critical to the maintenance and optimisation of the network. The approximate dates of this maintenance/upgrade work will be:

Impacted location: Neika, TAS & Downstream Sites & Upstream Sites
NBN estimates interruption 1 (Listed Below) will occur between:
Start: 24/09/19 7:00AM End: 24/09/19 8:00PM
NBN estimates interruption 2 (Listed Below) will occur between:
Start: 25/09/19 7:00AM End: 25/09/19 8:00PM
NBN estimates interruption 3 (Listed Below) will occur between:
Start: 01/10/19 7:00AM End: 01/10/19 8:00PM
NBN estimates interruption 4 (Listed Below) will occur between:
Start: 02/10/19 7:00AM End: 02/10/19 8:00PM
NBN estimates interruption 5 (Listed Below) will occur between:
Start: 03/10/19 7:00AM End: 03/10/19 8:00PM
NBN estimates interruption 6 (Listed Below) will occur between:
Start: 04/10/19 7:00AM End: 04/10/19 8:00PM
NBN estimates interruption 7 (Listed Below) will occur between:
Start: 05/10/19 7:00AM End: 05/10/19 8:00PM
NBN estimates interruption 8 (Listed Below) will occur between:
Start: 06/10/19 7:00AM End: 06/10/19 8:00PM

Change start
24/09/2019 07:00 Australian Eastern Standard Time

Change end
06/10/2019 20:00 Australian Eastern Daylight Time

This is expected to improve your service with us however, occasional loss of internet connectivity may be experienced during the maintenance/upgrade work.
Please note that the upgrades are performed by NBN Co and Activ8me has no control over them.
Thank you for your understanding in this matter, and your patience for if it does affect your service. We appreciate it.

The astute observer will note that this is pretty close to two weeks of scheduled maintenance. Sure enough, my neighbour and I (and presumably everyone else in the area) enjoyed major outages almost every weekday during that period, which is not ideal when you work from home. But, like I said at the start, they did finally get the job done.

Interestingly, according to activ8me, there is yet more NBN maintenance scheduled from 21 October 07:00 ’til 27 October 21:00, then again from 28 October 07:00 ’til 3 November 21:00 (i.e. another two whole weeks). The only scheduled upgrade I could find listed on iiNet’s status page is CM-177373, starting “in 13 days” with a duration of 6 hours, so possibly not the same thing.

Based on the above, I am convinced that there is some problem with iiNet’s status page not correctly reporting NBN incidents, but of course I have no idea whether this is NBN Co not telling iiNet, iiNet not listening to NBN Co, or if it’s just that the status web page is busted.