Broadband Sillyness

I went through a phase of being quite impressed with Australia's broadband, something which showed up while I was abroad in the comparably high-tech civilization of Europe. Mostly because I lived somewhere rural and couldn't get ADSL2+ and then when I moved to Australia lived right slap bang in a city center so the world was my oyster. Still, there's a fair amount of competition and a hefty unbundling from the incumbant telco going on, so you can choose a service from a number of operators.

If you live in one of the cherry picked exchange areas of course. When moving to somewhere slightly further out, things got a bit more hairy. For a start even if there is ADSL2+ available at the new address, there's no garantee they'll have spare ports for you. I picked one smaller provider, iPrimus, and got stuck in... only to then read the fine print which goes something like this:

1. For ADSL2+ you have to take their phone package. This costs $29.99 a month minimum.
2. You can either have a broadband plan which is too small, or too large. And the one that's too large has an arbitrary 24-month contract period. *
3. The best and most functional part of their diabolical web site is the bit about a VOIP service they'll flog you for a tenner a month. You can't have it instead of the phone though.

And, having clicked on the live chat thing to clarify said diabolical web site (you get a lot of this in Australia), the drongo on the other end declares that actualyl their VOIP service isn't available anyway. They hope to offer it again soon. Nothing on the web site to suggest it isn't available...

So iPrimus duly filed in the bin. Which is fine, there's other operators out there. I was very impressed with Internode but they don't do my new exchange. So I went to Iinet who have a very impressive, clear website with good offering and packages and an absolutely superb sign up process. Except it doesn't work and bombs out with a script error.

There's one thing you have to get used to in Australia and that's doing business on the telephone. In fact I should probably start like that from the outset and save time. Well, in the case of an Internet provider the web site is pretty good indictation of their core competencies don't you think?

* In fact most Australian ADSL has 12 month contracts. Not for any reason other than the fact they all seem to be getting away with it. Some sort of don't, but then charge you about $70 if you deign to move service before the end of six months. How backward...