On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 08:43, dgager wrote: > Thinking of switching to Bigpond cable (we do have the cable in our > street). Are there any hitches? Running Panther on recent iMac.
I had Telstra cable a few years ago. 3 months after signing up they decided to change the terms - reducing my plan from a 3 to 1 gig allowance. To get the old plan back it'd cost considerably more. They also uncapped the speed - yay, I didn't care. If I felt the need to leave the service due to this, I had to pay out my 12 month contract because the change was deemed "not to be detrimental to the user". I left anyway. The ACCC then forced them to allow users to leave without paying penalties so I was never billed for disconnection. That was something. Nonetheless, I will never deal with Telstra again - their installation service was bad and the only way I got a working 'net connection was to use another ISP's DNS servers and get my email from work. While their network _must_ have improved since then, all indications suggest that their appalling support and their attitude have not. I'm with WestNet currently, and I strongly recommend them. Their support is excellent - no hold times, they call you back. They often even have a clue about non-Windows systems. I had a pleasant call once where the support guy, on realising that I use a Linux router, said "Great, that makes things easier. Can you check out /var/log/messages and see if you're getting timeouts waiting for PADO packets?" Their network is as reliable as any other ADSL service - in other words, occasionally Telstra breaks a DSLAM but otherwise it's great. It's fast (I'm on 1.5MBit/256Kbit) and generally works well. I can't find a single reason to choose Telstra except having no other choice available. Craig Ringer
