I have spent this week on holidays finishing off some Council stuff and avoiding all the electioneering other than voting at pre-poll.

Since it has rained lots this week there has also been no getting out and about on the bike or any such fun things, so a lot of time has been spent at home in front of the computer as a I prepare for life after council. Plenty of extra time on my hand.

One of the ideas I have is to finally get my home studio and media business off the ground planning websites what technology would be required to do podcasts and videos properly, all that sort of thing.

That brings me to the topic of the internet and the fact that it is really slow and drops out at the hint of rain.

I pay over $110 a month for broadband services that are unbelievably slow and drop out constantly so with time on my hand I investigated the situation.

I live in Goonellabah and not some rural area, so I have to figure that my experience is pretty common especially for those that still have kids at school who have had to rely on home schooling over the last few years and it is frustrating.

We have Wi-Fi modem so we can connect multiple devices such as computers, iPad, gaming consoles, TVs for the obligatory Netflix account and phones for Deb, the young fella and myself.

From discussions I have had, this is not exactly overload for what we have and not everything is running at the one time.

I have run “speed tests” at various times to see how fast the internet is running and the download at its best 7.5 MBPS download and 2.4 MBPS upload and this is in the middle of the day during the week. On average it is 3.5 download and 2 upload. In comparison at work in South Lismore it is 54.8 download and 18.9 upload.

Even testing my phone on 4G it's 51.2 download and still poor at 2.8 upload.

Let’s face it my NBN connection is bad.

So, I wondered where the “node” is that the fibre is run to ands if it was close enough to get fibre from the house connected too. The irony is I had to go online to search and came up empty handed other than knowing what a node looked like and the suggestion that I walk the neighbourhood until I found it.

I did, I got wet and found nothing.

With time on my hands, I went to the Telstra shop in the Square to ask some questions and they went out of their way to try and find me some answers and possible solutions, thanks Jess.

Firstly, confirmation is that my speeds are slow, really slow.

The dropouts are probably caused by water in the copper lines between the house and the mystery node.

They didn’t know where the node was either.

They did send me a link to an NBN site that you could put in your address and get a quote on having fibre connected between the home and the mystery node.

That would cost me $20,148 including GST…… pick me up off the floor.

Obviously, that is not going to happen.

They also organised for someone from Telstra to call me, which they did within a few hours, to talk about the issues and what might be able to be done.

The suggestion firstly is a new modem which would make the signal stronger around the house.

Not sure how this is going to go because I often use a cable to connect my computer to the modem so as I minimise the chance of dropouts during meetings and not much is gained in the speeds when I do this. But hey I will go with this as it will at least count the modem out as a problem and the new one will also transfer to the 4G network if the NBN drops out.

If that doesn’t improve it enough then a technician will be sent out to further investigate, but if the copper wire system needs to be replaced then what?

Am I back at a $20k spend on fibre?

All I want like everyone else is fast reliable internet as we were promised with the NBN which is what I am paying for but not receiving and never had.

I guess there is the option that they charge me less for the service I am receiving but that doesn’t really fix the problem.

In this day and age when we rely on the internet and technology for so many services in our life from work to entertainment sitting there watching the spinning wheel of death on the screen is not on.