Internode NBN500

I have just converted to the Internode NBN500 plan which is now the same price as the NBN100 plan. I’m in a HFC area so they won’t let me get fiber to the home (due to Malcolm Turnbull breaking the NBN to help Murdoch) so I’m limited to what HFC can do.

I first tried it out on a 100mbit card and got speeds of 96/47 mb/s according to speedtest.net. I’ve always had the MTU set to 1492 for the PPPoE connection (something I forgot to mention in my blog post about connecting to the Arris CM8200 on Debian [1]) but when run on the 100mbit card I had to set it to 1488. Apparently 1488 is the number because 4 bytes are taken for the VLAN header and 8 bytes for the PPPoE header. But it seems that when using gigabit ethernet it doesn’t take 4 bytes for the VLAN (comments explaining that would be appreciated).

when connected via gigabit with a MTU of 1492 I got speeds of 534/46 which are quite good. When I tested with my laptop on a Wifi link while sitting next to the main node of my Kogan Wifi6 mesh [2] via 2.4GHz wifi I got 172/45. When using 5GHz I got 514/41. When using 5GHz at the far end of my home over the mesh I got 200/45.

Here’s a table summarising the speeds. I rounded all speeds off to 1Mbit/s because I don’t think that the results are even that accurate. I think that Wifi5 over mesh reporting a faster upload speed than Wifi5 near the AP is because of random factors not an actual benefit to being further away, but I will do more tests later on.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/06/01/internode-nbn-arris-cm8200/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/09/15/kogan-ax1800-wifi6-mesh/