Switched to the NBN - seems good

We've been receiving letters for months from ISPs offering to be the ones to connect us to the NBN which has just arrived in our area.

As we were already on Telstra cable we decided to switch with them. I chose to self install the modem and a router arrived a week ago. It was puzzling because it didn't have a cable connection on the back.

Today the missing piece, the black box shown at right, appeared and it connects to the cable and to the router.

The router is a white box titled "F@st 5355TLS" made by Sagemcom Broadband SAS, not a company I was previously aware of. It seems like a competent device with 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, two ethernet ports (not counting the WAN port), USB file sharing, and a telephone line port which we don't plan to use.

In the past I had put the Netgear modem into bridge mode and used a TP-Link wireless router which served us well and I may well switch to that again if the Sagemcom box proves unreliable. So far all seems good and the measured speed is more than I was expecting (I'm paying for 50Mbps down and 20Mbps up).

Ping time is better than reported there, normally around 10-12ms. I'm not clear if the Sagemcom box is actually needed given that I have other routers here I'm happy with.

I had a few problems getting ethernet connected devices going, in the end connecting them one by one did the trick, there was some sort of network storm going on possibly triggered by the change in IP address range.

It's weird that when switching to the NBN you are compelled to get a landline phone - something we have not had for some years. Here's the bit of the signup form that forces you to get a phone:

I tried putting my mobile phone in there but it wouldn't let me. (Probably a bad idea anyhow). A few more tests tonight:

Update - first problems

Tonight I started to see high ping losses. This is from the router:

 Pinging 8.8.8.8 with 64 bytes of data:

 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=7  TTL=59  seq=1
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=9  TTL=59  seq=2
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=8  TTL=59  seq=3
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=7  TTL=59  seq=4
 Request timed out.
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=7  TTL=59  seq=6
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=8  TTL=59  seq=7
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=9  TTL=59  seq=8
 Request timed out.
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=8  TTL=59  seq=10

 Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8
  Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 8, Lost = 2 (20% loss),
 Approximate round trip times in milliseconds:
  Minimum = 7, Maximum = 9, Average = 7

Telstra's service status shows no known issues, but I'm not sure if that is relevant any more.  Rebooted the router, no change. Rebooted the NBN cable interface box fixed it.

Now ping from my computer on the network looks pretty good: