If E and I seem to be a little quiet this week, it’s because the foolishness of Australian telecommunications has left us broadbandless while we change from ADSL on one ISP to ADSL 2+ on a different one.
The reasons for this are many, but the main one is that the incumbents have seriously gone downhill in the past six months.
The upshot is that we are relying on borrowed dial-up for the next little while.
Of course, if you can’t reach us online, we do still have phones. 🙂
Ahh, and just when I was considering if I churn off the one you are moving to… for no other reason than surely the grass is greener….
Can I just trust you’ve done all the research and I’ll just stick with what I’ve got, but maybe go up to ADSL2?
Andrea.
I had a fairly complex decision-tree to get to Netspace. It has to do with who has ADSL2+ on my exchange at present. If TPG had been there, I would have gone with them for their mind-boggling $70-for-150GB plan, but they don’t come online until October, and Internode’s suckiness was so great, and my paranoia about TPG’s old reputation so scary, that I decided Netspace were the lesser of several hundred evils.
I would be teaching you to suck eggs if I pointed you at Broadband Choice, wouldn’t I?
Sorry to be not much help. 🙁
I can recommend TPG. I’ve been using their ADSL2+ for the past year, there have only been a couple of minor outages, and one strange instance of my usage meter sky rocketing over my monthly limit. All of these problems were fixed quickly.
Just don’t rely on them for good phone support, though their (unofficial) support through the Whirlpool Forums is apparently pretty good.
What’s happened with Internode, apart from the cutting of usenet and the hiking of fees?
1. Jacked up the prices on the plan we were on by ~25%.
2. Added terms to our contract so that usage over quota was not only shaped, but if you consumed more than 2GB after you got shaped, you were liable for per-gigabyte fees as well.
3. Stuffed up our billing repeatedly. It took nine calls, three suspension notices (without any other form of notice beforehand), eighteen incorrect invoices (“Oh, you can ignore those, they’re errors. Sorry!”) and four months for them to sort out their own chaos when we wanted to temporarily buy extra bandwidth one month.
4. Cancelled the SAGE-AU discount.
5. Continued not to have ADSL2+ outside of the inner city, while everyone else is happily rolling out their own ADSL2+ DSLAMS across the country.
6. They take longer to respond to support or billing questions every time I call, and seem to be getting ruder and less knowledgeable phone staff.
That’s about it, really. The fee-hike was the big one though: they were already overpriced by about 20% against the going rate. Now I’d call it closer to 40%.
Ah, well, it appears I won’t have much choice. While ADSL2 is enabled at the Richmond exchange, all the ports are taken – that’s what you get for wanting to live in the inner ‘burbs!
Netspace don’t even reckon that I can get ADSL there, but TPG is happy to provide (at least according to their webpage and the current tenant’s phone number).
35 days and counting….