Once again I learned the perils of counting my chickens before they hatch.

Was starting to looking forward to ADSL after being stuck on 56k modem for seemingly decades....wait not seemingly, literally.

After what seems like forever the price of broadband in Australia is finally coming down to affordable levels after Telstra (our friendly local govt endorsed telecommunications monopoly) did it's best to keep us in the stone age indefinitely. So naturally I jumped on it and signed up with an ISP, not Telstra...directly....but hey, all the isps have to go through Telstra since they own all the lines.

Anyway, just found out I'm likely too far from the telephone exchange to get ADSL. You see, Telstra does everything half assed....including the quality of our telephone lines and number of exchanges. Living in the middle of Cairns, not a huge city but big-a-frickin-nuff, I certainly never thought living too far from an exchange would be an issue. In a non-Telstra world it probably wouldn't be.

Still awaiting a final linecheck, but I'm not optimistic as everything remotely associated with Telstra in this country is one big cluster****.

So many monopolies suck.

Yeah, I feel your pain. I moved house recently, so I needed to change from Cable to ADSL because Cable doesn't run to this place...the first guy tells us it isn't a problem, we'll be totally fine, the kit is in the mail. The second guy (who we call the day before we move as confirmation) informs us that there's never been any record of a change logged, and the kit is not in the mail. The third guy we call says ADSL isn't even available in our area, and there's nothing we can do about it. It keeps going - every person we phone gives us a different answer.

At this point, the Evil family declares war on Telstra. Four weeks after we get in, and we're only just getting off Dial-up again...surely a situation demanding a lynch mob, if ever there was one.

This is more of a quiz than a poll, Jaiph :p

I call this one "The Gargantuan Anger in Two Frames"

That's the way it works Jaiph, if you don't live in Melbourne or Sydney, Telstra officially designates you "outback rural" and unoffically as "backwater town" and are thereby undeserving of Telstra's obviously limited resources.

Out of curiosity what were the details of plan you signed up for? All the broadband stuff I've seen still amounts to getting screwed down here. Eg the $30 a month Optus plan that gives you a 200MB download limit. Per month. yeah that's right you overseas type people, 200MB per month. A $70 plan can get you 3GB/month. Pity us. Send us money and cable modems.

I cry a little bit on the inside whenever one of our American counterparts complains about hitting their 2GB/day download cap.

Everybody in their right mind in australia hates telstra.

guy I know had the run-around with them a month ago or so, spent 2 months having telstra tell him he couldn't get adsl(in the middle of brisbane). turned out it was a database error.

I thought the monopoly was Telecom? Or was that just a long, long time ago? *shrugs*

I feel your pain Jeff. Similar problem here, except instead of being to far, they have optical fibre telephone lines which are incompatible with adsl. And they don't plan to do anything until they're happy with their bloody interest counter.


Yoshi: Telecom became Telestra.

That explains things.

Yeah I read "Underground: The Book" (outlines the Australian hacker scene of 80s-early 90s) and the amount of hatred in that book for Telecom is like...massive.

This is fun to watch!

Here in AM ERI CA you can get somewhat cheap, cable access without a cap. (well in most parts)

Actually you can get a lot better than that now Run....just not from Telstra, whose ADSL plans are gigantic rip offs.

The ISP I signed up for was iiNet and the deal was $59.95 a month for 512/128k adsl....12 GB peak / 12 GB off-peak a month...uploads are free.....oh and also free 'pipe' transfers, which means you can DL a lot of files for free by using special australian servers. Good enough to get me interested.

Take a look at this link for further info of current ADSL plans in Australia: http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/ - great great site.

PS - thanks Yoshimi and Ghorg, you put a smile back on my face



Yeah, everyone hates Telstra...they are the reason Australia is WELL behind the ball with broadband. They like to blame our vast distances, but that's BS as Canada is spread out too and they are way further ahead than us.

The problem with Telstra is they are the former government run telecommunications body...there used to be NO competition, they owned EVERYTHING. This only started to change over the last decade or so......around about the same time our government started trying to sell off Telstra for spending money. So right now you have a huge monopoly which is half private owned/half government that does everything in their power to stamp out the competition....and since all the existing lines belong to them (and no new lines are allowed to be laid), they are really really good at it.

The govt is trying to sell off their remaining 51% stake in Telstra and I guarantee if that ever happens things will get about ten times worse. Imagine a FULLY private company that has control over all the phone lines in Australia.

Yeah, just shoot us now :p

I get cable with unlimted downloads 512k upstream unlimited downstream for for $69.95 a month from...... Telstra. *flees*

Is there only like 1 exchange in Cairns or something?

Telstra can go suck my ******* ****.

That is all.

No, but not enough and Telstra's lines are **** quality compared to most western countries......and yeah cable internet, in the very few places it's available, is a different ballgame.

Cairns, despite being one of Australia's fastest growing cities, has no cable. At all.

Yeah, I remember them talking about Telecom being government owned, and that was part of the reason they disliked Australian government so much.

Man, what a great book. I gotta read it again.

http://www.underground-book.com/

That's the site, and it hosts the book in .txt and .pdf formats I believe. I read it in .txt and loved every minute of it. It's an insanely good read. For free too!

Well at home there are still no cable lines, and it's out of range for DSL... So it's not like you're the only one...

Of course at school there are all of those really nice clusters of fiber optic cable... *whistle*

Ok this is nuts.

Just found out about a guy who lives like 50-100m from our house who has 1500/256k adsl. When he applied originally on his main phone line it was rejected as being too far from the exchange....then he got a second line put in, re-applied, and bingo, 1500/256k.

The **** is up with that?

Put in a second line

My want for ADSL does not exceed my desire to avoid needlessly pissing any money Telstra's way.

We use TPG for ADSL, and I think it's around 70 a month, and it's unlimited downloads/uploads, but it's capped at 50kbytes/sec. Strangely, this is referred to as "512kbits/sec". By my calculations, we're getting ripped off 16kbytes/sec. Bastards. At least it's unlimited, though. I recall with Telstra that they implemented their 3gig/month thing about a month after we'd just signed up with them, expecting unlimited. Oh, plus it was capped at 40k/sec. Of course, we weren't allowed to change OUR contract at that point to get out of it, oh no...

And some people here have a cry when they only get 500kbytes/sec!

That's insane....they can change the conditions of your connection at will and there is nothing you can do about it. That's fair. $#^#$%&$#% Telstra. With a rake.

Well before we got our current plan, I was NOT happy with telstra.

Current plan: about 60 a month, 10 gig xload (both up and down), er... "unlimited" down, 128k up, and if we go over, we MIGHT get capped down to 64k I think it is download.

Still not too happy with them.

Btw, "unlimited" means about 512k, but we cant be bothered to tell you exactly what. The fastest Ive gotten is about 600k.
That was from what is called "Game Arena" and files.bigpond.com, which are two Telstra repositories of a lot of stuff.. game demos, patches, mods, linux distros and we get free downloads from there, Ie they dont go towards our download limit. Thats another re-deeming factor.

I feel for you, I was stuck with AOL for far too many long years.

But, now I have cable, and things are good. *hugs cable modem*

BLOODY COUP!!!!

/runs

Much love for GameArena. Getting 500k-1mb/sec downloads on all the new demos, patches, and mods is very very nice.

Hahahahahaha. Beautiful. Exactly what I was thinking.

Americans are asses.

Go CA NA DA !

I hope.

You mean...

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LA ND BRIT L AN D BRIT LA ND
BR IT LA ND B RI T LA ND BR IT
LANDBRITL AN DBRITLAND
BRITLANDBRITLANDBRIT
LANDBRITLANDBRITLAND
BRITLANDB RI TLANDBRIT
LAND BR IT L AN D BR IT LAND
BR IT LA ND B RI T LA ND BR IT
LA ND BRIT L AN D BRIT LA ND



Oh and I live in a town with a population of 30,000 and get pretty cheap cable.

RULE BRITANIA

Any monthly-fee ISP that limits downloads is cheating with their service, and should be shot. If they plan on limiting their service by bandwidth usage, then they should charge people per gigabyte downloaded, not per month. By agreeing to charge you by the months you remain in the contract, it implies that the service's cost is based upon the duration of the contract. I hate businesses that try to cheat the accepted system to increase profits.

You should live in Valencia, CA. The city government has arranged a deal with...SBC I believe that basically allows for everyone in Valencia to get good DSL connectivity.

I just noticed that post... Man, I do think that Telstra is commiting a massive crime there. (the kind where the CEO appears on the front page of the paper in handcuffs) Too bad they're a monopoly; they're liable to get away with it.

/me huggles Time Warner Cable

I get 3mbps connection that is consistant in speed (around 320-350kb/s) and a semi-reasonable cost at $42 USD a month.

My only complaints are the rather low upload speeds (384kbits) and the cable's tendency to die at odd times, like 3 am on a thursday, or some such event.

3mbps, 384 up (which is actually quite GOOD, CM) I'm happy.

...384.....low......man, I don't think you can even GET that fast upload speed on adsl in Australia. :p

Still waiting on final word about my fate, fully intending to kick up a huge *** stink if it's rejected. From what I've read my line is surely good enough for the 512k adsl I ordered, but apparently Telstra flat out rejects lines unless they can handle 1500k....regardless if that's what the customer wants. That's ****ing stupid.

I wish I know what my upload limit is, but I've never hit it... Hmm...

I vote comedy option "Loves to hate"

Would they even GIVE us 1500k? I doubt it.

Damn Telstra. Damn them all to hell.

I just read in the newspaper that they're being fined 3 mil and an extra 1 mil a day for charging their wholesalers (i.e., other ISPs) more than their customers, thus enforcing their monopoly. Bastards.

I hope everything works out for you, Jaiph.

Hell, if you were off to light their headquarters on fire, I'd offer you the same good wishes.

Please say you did that in a program and dont have that much time on your hands. :p

But yea i agrea with Chaz. We are asses in america.

....um.....some late breaking info. Been waiting for final rejection email since they weren't hopeful at all they could convince Telstra to connect me......but....yeah....just logged into the ISP toolbox for the hell of it to check my status (been on 'provisioning' for weeks).


ACTIVE.

I am officially over the mother****ing moon.

Still hate Telstra mind you, but..........YES YES YES YES YES.