After a week or so of having to reboot the thing once or twice a day, and a polite, but not terribly productive conversation with iiNet’s tech support department which elicited the news that we were suffering from a “port error” – a vague diagnosis which could mean anything from interference on the phone line to a faulty line filter or possibly a challenging astrological transit – Bleeding Edge opted to replace the modem.

It’s not the first time we’ve tangled with the Belkin modem, and we weren’t prepared to mess with firmware or engage in another one of those isolation tests in which you uncouple every telephone device and hope that whatever transitory fault you’re suffering from manifests itself before the people who are no doubt trying urgently to ring you start assuming you’ve left town, or been arrested ... pardon us for a minute while we pop another one of those anti-paranoia pills.

As it happened, we’d already made the same decision in relation to the small business system we administer. While we haven’t had any problems with the Billion BiPAC 7404 modem/router, we had become increasingly worried by the fact that it lacked an essential feature for any small business: automatic fail-over capability.

Internet connectivity has become as critical to small – even very small – businesses as it is for large corporations. The need for reliable access to email and the Web and the increasing number of useful cloud computing applications is obvious, but with an increasing number of home offices and small businesses also relying on VoIP (Voice over IP) to provide cheap, reliable telephone calls, losing Internet access can be a disaster.

Fortunately, it’s possible these days to build voice and data connections that are even more reliable than conventional phone/data services, by adding a low-cost ADSL, cable, or wireless service to the primary Internet feed. In the past, these fail-over systems were a big-budget luxury. They’re now within the reach even of SOHO operators like Bleeding Edge.

Plug in a primary ADSL/ADSL2/2+ and you get fast sync speeds and a robust connection that copes with a heavy load from multiple PCs – a scenario which can at times unsettle cheaper modems.

We’ve been running a second Optus cable service at the Bleeding Edge cave on a separate network. Now it plugs into a second WAN Ethernet port on the modem on the DrayTek which can use it to provide additional bandwidth, which is called load balancing, or automatically switch to it if the primary service fails.

We don’t have cable or an additional ADSL feed at the spouse’s office, where the second DrayTek is going. But because it can also handle 3G, satellite and other wireless USB devices, we can hook it up to a low-cost wireless plan to give us a continuous connection there.

You can also connect two VoIP phones and up to 12 SIP accounts, which gives us a failover capability if the Asterisk VoIP system dies. The VoIP lines have proved to be more reliable than the Telstra PSTN service, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever use the 2820VN for that purpose, but its VoIP connections are particularly clear, and it remains a comforting option. A new DrayTek model, due in the next few months, will offer an Asterisk-like PBX option.

DrayTek employs roughly 40 per cent of its payroll in research and development, and the results are clear in every area of the 2820’s engineering. You can plug in a USB storage device and set up FTP storage, and Its Wireless N range is outstanding, allowing you to run four different SSIDs with separate access and bandwidth controls.

Because most small businesses these days need fast, secure remote access to their office network, VPN (Virtual Private Network) performance was a priority. The 2820VN allows you to set up as many as 32 VPN tunnels. It doesn’t skimp on VPN protocols, offering a choice of PPTP, IPSec, L2TP and L2TP over IPSec. Unlike earlier versions, the 2820 provides NAT, firewall and VPN protection for the WAN and wireless connections.

DrayTek’s Australian website provides useful assistance for setting up local cable and 3G USB modems at tinyurl.com/lykl9r.

Our only disappointment was the fact that only one of the four Ethernet ports has gigabit speeds, although most people who need gigabit capability probably already have a gigabit switch. We’ve been very happy with the TP-Link four-port gigabit switches we picked up at Radio Parts in West Melbourne (radioparts.com.au).

Our iiNet ADSL 2 connection was slowly breaking down, and we didn't have the energy to deal with it. Every second click on a web link sparked a prolonged delay, followed by an error message informing us “The requested web page is not available. The address may not be correct, or there may be a temporary problem with this site.”

Each of these problems was temporary, as temporary, in fact, as the space of a second click, although second time around, the pages loaded only very slowly. And yet we remained in the grip of IT ennui.

The will to deal with the issue arrived only when Bleeding Edge started a LogMeIn IT Reach session to add a new voice recording to the Asterisk PBX box at the spouse's practice and activate it as the Easter voicemail message.

The remote control, file transfer and diagnostic tools of LogMeIn IT Reach have been remarkably responsive using fast ADSL 2 services of iiNet and at the other end, Internode, and we recommend it highly. But with a flawed connection, it kept dropping out. If the spouse practice was to have an Easter voicemail message, we'd have to make a trip. It was more sensible to end our procrastination, and deal with the problem.

It began promisingly enough. As usual, the response time for iiNet's tech support was gratifyingly fast. Unfortunately, things quickly went downhill. We struck an unusually officious support person who completely dismissed our suggestion that the problem possibly related to our Belkin modem.

He insisted there was nothing wrong with the modem or the iiNet system, and the problem “is something to do with the way your computer is handling data”.

We still favoured the modem as the source of the problem, but we were prepared to try his solution. That involved using the ping diagnostic tool, which in its most basic form, allows users to establish whether two hosts on a network or the internet are connected.

You can add some additional ping commands which give you a good deal more information on the state of the connection, and that's what our tech support person was looking for.

The command he wanted us to use was ping -f -l 1492 iinet.net.au. The response it produced was “packet needs to be fragmented but DF set”. The explanation he offered us was that our modem's Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) was set up to send data in packets of 1492 bytes. These were too large, he claimed and the packets were being fragmented, forcing the modem to re-transmit the data. That was the cause of our problem. We might have accepted all this if we'd been running Windows XP, but we're using Windows Vista, and it's much smarter about managing broadband networking. We weren't sure that forcing a data packet size on the network with ping was an accurate reflection of what was happening on our system.

Nevertheless we followed his advice to reset the MTU setting in the modem's browser configuration page. While it did seem to improve our problem, we weren't convinced it had solved it. We still suspected something was wrong either with the modem, or with iiNet, but we'd had enough for one day, and decided to sleep on it.

The next morning, thing were as bad as ever. We rang iiNet tech support again, and found ourselves talking to another tech support person, again within a few minutes. His tests detected some minor interference on the line, but not enough to cause our problems.

He suggested slowing the ADSL speed from 18Mbps (an enviable speed, we realise, that results from living quite close to the exchange). We suggested instead that we'd like to try resetting the modem. Fortunately, he was much more willing to listen than his colleague, and he agreed that was a reasonable first step. When we completed the reset – a process that involves sticking a paper clip into the modem's reset hole then re-entering the connection details – we saw a dramatic improvement in the ping times.

We then did something we should have done in the first place: check the modem manufacturer's site for a firmware update. It turned out there had been two since we'd installed the modem about a year earlier. When we downloaded and installed the latest firmware, our problems ended.

We were getting ping times of 16 to 18 ms and at speedtest.net – a great site to keep track of your broadband performance – downloads were coming through at 8.9 Mbps. By the next day they'd improved to 12.9Mbps, which is perfectly acceptable to Bleeding Edge.

We do recommend that if your broadband speed seems to have declined, it might be a good idea to do a factory reset of the modem. And if you haven't checked the firmware version recently, it might be a good idea to do so.

With the EP-1 now on the scene, and hopefully to spawn a new genre of digital cameras, the camera etymologists will have a fun time classifying camera types. The non photographer layman, however, may just prefer to ask - “How big is it” or “How much does it cost?” and leave it at that. (The latter is often uttered by long suffering spouses (spice?) of camera fans. Let’s review some camera mis-categories…

The DSLR

Or more dyslexic-ally, the DLRS or DLSR. Why does one call it a Single Lens when we can fit any / many lenses on the same body? Hmm… Is it because we once had a genre of cameras called Twin Lens Reflex (TLR)? Try and point a young ‘un to a TLR on any high street. Can’t find one? Not even a Lubitel? Well, then why pursue the DSLR abbreviation? Is it because people who used to shoot an SLR still need a mirror to look at themselves through? Maybe they should be more aptly called Interchangeable Lens Reflex Camera. Could you come up with more modern, more descriptive acronym?

The Point and Shoot

For several years now, I have been holding out that “Point and Shoot” is an activity, not a camera. One can just as easily P&S with a Nikon D3X as with a Panasonic Kodak instant-disposable-film-thing-from-Safeway. Aching wrists and elbows notwithstanding. Really, I’d love to see this term go away, but camera marketers will be too enthralled by it’s mental pictorialisation to discard it.

The Compact Cam

Now, for me, that’s an apt title. Either you have something as thin as a ladies cosmetic compact or you have something as large as the EP-1 – both, you would expect to be aggressively flat and chic.

The Bridge Cam

The Bridge to what? The River Kwai? Originally meant as an in-between camera, something that has more semi-manual features than a cheap digital camera but lacking the mirror box mechanism of the DSLR. Or is that more semi-automatic features. How can you tell? It’s just a bridge.

The Ultra Zoom (UZ) or the Mega Zoom

That conjures up a biggish camera, with a 10x zoom or 12x or 16x or 24x zoom. El Macho – even outzooms the DSLR. But then. Even semi-compact cams like the Ricoh R8 do 10x now. When the lens retracts, the camera is indeed slim and svelte.

The DSLR like camera

Now, that appellation stings. You do know that “DSLR like” cameras don’t actually work at all or perform at all like DSLRs? They don’t have a Reflex optical path, they don’t use Phase Contrast Autofocus so they don’t click very quickly? They only thing DSLR like is that they have a hump.

The EVIL

Recently coined, EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens) cameras were supposed to knock out the DSLRs. Like yesterday. Except that they haven’t yet. And the Olympus PEN EP-1 is pretty much in the spirit of an EVIL – i.e. anti-DSLR. Except that the EP-1 doesn’t have an Electronic Viewfinder. You can clip on a specialised viewfinder into the hotshoe, but that is single framed, Optical Viewfinder (OVF).

Aiyaiayai. How is all this jargon going to help me convince the spouse that I need to save up for an EP-1? Instead of getting that BlendTec Blender?

His attitude seems to be that Telstra owns the customers in perpetuity; that it's the only body capable of building a network; that it ought to be left to the business of screwing the community, its competitors, the ACCC, the Government etc., which it has done so well, for so long, at everybody else's expense.

That seems to be the point of his column, "Let Telstra get on with what it does best". Or am I missing something?

He claims that the people who are running telecommunications policy are Luddites, that the declaration of telecommunications services is a rort, that advisers on the Government's NBN policies are on a gravy train etc., etc.

I can't see any difference between Telstra's view and Kenneth's view. They're equally myopic and tendentious. Which tends to undermine my opinion of Kenneth Davidson.

The average Web user probably isn't aware of the significance of the Web analysis algorithm developed by Google co-founder Larry Page, and the increasingly manic fixation of an entire industry of search engine optimisation and marketing experts on understanding and honestly (and in some cases dishonestly) exploiting it.

You could remain entirely unaware of the existence of the PageRank universe unless you installed the Google Toolbar and started observed the movements of a tiny green band in the toolbar's central white slot, as you navigate from one site to another.

It's a long way from our paltry 3 to the maximum PageRank of 10, but that sudden elevation from zero was enormously encouraging, if symptomatic of an increasingly obsessive state of mind.

We're beginning to wonder, in fact, if OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) isn't an inevitable consequence of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, which was revolutionised by Larry's eponymous rating system, and Google's multi-billion-dollar AdWords system.

All those hours with Steve influenced us to change many of the elements of our Web page which were influenced by the elements of conventional graphic design, but unfortunately made it highly unlikely visitors would easily find what they were looking for, and stay around long enough to become customers.

We've also had to drop everything we've learned in a lifetime of professional writing, and develop a different way of communicating. Our guide in that area has been linguist Janice “Ginny” Redish, through her book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works ($55, Morgan Kaufmann).

Her advice helped us to let go of at least half of the words on the site and hold readers' attention longer – facts which we confirmed by installing the code for Google Analytics. We used that extraordinary free tool to discover where our visitors came from, and analyse statistics like bounce rates (immediate exits by visitors), time spent on the site and the response to different pages.

We've also spent hours learning the intricacies of Joomla!, the CMS (Content Management System) that manages our Web site.

The results have been gratifying. Aside from the improved PageRank, we've increased the Click Through Rate on our AdWords more than ten-fold – admittedly from a tiny base.

Managing AdWords campaigns is a tricky business. You have to choose the right keywords – the search terms your prospective customers use when looking for the services you provide – and construct three-line text ads with no more than 95 characters that will perform well against your competitors' efforts.

You can learn a good deal about the black arts of AdWords if you're prepared to buy services like those offered at perrymarshall.com. A relatively modest investment in one of Perry Marshall's products helped us immensely in our early days.

But the process requires constant monitoring, testing and refining. Because we also have columns to write, and Google PageRanks to improve, we're leaning towards outsourcing the responsibility to an expert.

There's no shortage of people with dubious pretensions to expertise in the world of Web design and online marketing, and it's essential, in our opinion, to obtain a recommendation from a trustworthy source … preferably after you've done enough homework to understand the principles.

In our case, we had a conversation with Adam Blake, who runs a home nursing company called Kinder Caring. His business was spending around $100,000 a year on Yellow Pages advertising. He spent another $70,000 with a marketing consultancy that failed conspicuously to contribute to the bottom line.

Eventually he signed up with search engine marketing expert Philip Shaw, at CleverClicks.com. He's transferred his ad spend to Google AdWords, and in the process cut his expenditure in half, and increased sales by 25 per cent.

Shaw is a former accountant and investment banker who worked with Woolworths and the National Bank, before re-educating himself and establishing CleverClicks as a project-management consultancy that looks after the complete mix of online marketing, including Web design, search engine optimisation and online advertising campaigns.

We've committed some funds to developing a more complex campaign with CleverClicks, and we'll report on the results. In the meantime, we're doing some heavy reading on the art of turning a PageRank of 3 into a PageRank of 5.

Point: You might speed up Firefox if you reduce the the history cache.

IT person’s response: Ok, let’s do it now and check out the effect.

Considered “normal” responses:

If I change that setting could my machine worse?

Where is it in the menu again? Do I need to write this down? What if I forget how to switch it back? Is it in the manual? Does it have a manual? Can I ring you if it doesn’t work?

I wonder whether MYOB will go faster?

Do you think it will work on all my machines? Even the one that my cousin’s son has? You know, the one who just came back from London and is backpacking with around Australia…

I don’t use Firefox. I use the one with the blue e.  Do you think it will work the same way?

Why can’t Microsoft have come out with this discovery? I mean, we pay them enough.

Note to self: make an effort, bridge the gap.