Thread: Bigpond - Useless.

Originally Posted by Master Splinter

Hummmm - mine's $29.95 for 250gig + free ABC TV iView, free Steam downloads and other extras, so you might be able to get a better deal than that!

I get shaped to 1mbps after that though, so it's almost like being back on ADSL if I blow the limit!

If only I could ship interweb service...

This is my home connection;



It costs me about $45 per month, including telephone and whatnot. No download limits, you can see how fast it is and the computer I'm using to send this depressing message to you (Lenovo Y580, maxxed out) is half paid for by the interweb company (about $450).

It's not perfect of course. There is occasional weirdness, and there is a strict 2 year contract (after which the price goes up?) as well as a few other things that rub me the wrong way, but I can shrug off as they're minor annoyances, not serious faults.

There are an awful lot of screwy, annoying and frustrating things in this land of the rising sun and some thing where you just want to grab the nearest fool by the ears, shake them into mush while screaming at them so they understand how stupid they're being, but danged if they haven't got interweb worked out.

We won't go into the mobile network. That's all kinds of screwed up. I'd give parts of my anatomy for a sensible mobile phone company...

(Optus is not a valid model. They can rot in heck.)

Stu.

I called and logged a problem with the ombudsman. Telstra called me back on day nine of the ten day reply limit to let me know they had recieved the complaint. It's now been two further months and no one at Telstra has responded to the complaint, should I complain about that as well?
Their organization and I use that word guardedly , is a complete mess that no one understands from end to end, if there was another provider in my regional area I would use them.
The mention of NBN makes me cringe. It's an excuse that has now legitimized not upgrading copper in regional areas. I pay for an adsl2+ service and get a max of 2 mbits/s download on good days, often around 0.9mbps. I can get 3G but the cost is horrific.
NBN does not even offer me the promise of an improved connection or stability. Yet I am probably better off than others.
There is no NBN subsidy if you can get 3gb a month for less than $100 from 3G and that strikes me as outrageous.
If you are not living in a capital city it appears you are out of luck.

Originally Posted by crash486

I called and logged a problem with the ombudsman. Telstra called me back on day nine of the ten day reply limit to let me know they had recieved the complaint. It's now been two further months and no one at Telstra has responded to the complaint, should I complain about that as well?
Their organization and I use that word guardedly , is a complete mess that no one understands from end to end, if there was another provider in my regional area I would use them.
The mention of NBN makes me cringe. It's an excuse that has now legitimized not upgrading copper in regional areas. I pay for an adsl2+ service and get a max of 2 mbits/s download on good days, often around 0.9mbps. I can get 3G but the cost is horrific.
NBN does not even offer me the promise of an improved connection or stability. Yet I am probably better off than others.
There is no NBN subsidy if you can get 3gb a month for less than $100 from 3G and that strikes me as outrageous.
If you are not living in a capital city it appears you are out of luck.

Hello,

If I can get 150KB (ie 0.15Mb) per second I am doing well.

NBN puzzles me as well, they are able to confidently tell me that I will definitely not be connected any time in the next 3 years.

I might be connected in 10 years either by satellite, or mobile phone.

I live in Latrobe Valley approx 15klm south of the Princes highway approx 160 klm southeastish of Melbourne.

I think its absolutely stunning whats available in capital cities - but then again they havent got kangaroos and koalas and trees and snakes and stuff in the back yard.

Swap ya - a couple of kangaroos for 1 Mb per second ?

Bill

Lol steamingbill, I raise your kangaroo with two rock wallabies!

the NBN will cover 90% of the australian population ,

10% of the land area

i live 20km south of Darwin , 1km on the wrong side of a black stump that makes Australia Post list my post code as " out back "

the local land line ( telsra owned ) is useless as a net connection , so have too use a USB dongle , as every one else does ,

at advertized data speeds , 1 mobile tower can connect 256 people at this speed , when more log on the speeds are cut , they drop lines , its pritty much useless at any time other than at 2am

Cool NBN coming , lol , Darwin wont get a cable roll out , NOT IN THE 90% of australians ,
So cool i live in the out back , i can get satellite connection ,
NO , YOU HAVE MOBILE COVERAGE < USE A DONGLE $60 per 4GB ,has too be used in one month $20 per 250MB if you only perchase $20 at a time
Microsoft PLEASE SEND ME UPDATES BY SNAIL MAIL

looks at the stash of roo's and raises you a couple'a crocodiles and a baby water buffalo
BUT WE SHOULD BE HAPPY THAT DARWIN EXCHANGE IS CONNECTED TO THE NODE by fiber

Is a National Broadband Network that misses on hole state completely realy a national network ?

From memory Conroy's stated target is 93% of "premises" will get fibre to the inside of the wall nearest the street. A further 5% will get "wireless" and the last 2% will get satelite.

A couple of years ago I went to an NBN presentation that sort of covered what that means.
I understand that for planning the network, the NBN used the AustPost address data base -- which is supposed to contain every address in the country and be geocoded. (let's not go there as I'm sure very few if any posties have a GPS on their bike.)
Another factor in the NBN planning, as said at the presentation, was the physical distance of each address from the nearest exchange -- it has something to do with the maximum length of a stand of fibre before you need a repeater or amplifier.

One interesting "factoid" passed on at the presentation is that there's an isolated property in western NSW which will get fibre because it's too far from the nearest node for wireless and the cost of installing and maintaining a satelite earth station for one customer is greater than the cost of running a single fibre 100km or so.


Out of interest I used a piece of GIS mapping software to analyse the 2006 census data and plot the dwelling density for each census collection district in NSW, Vic and Qld. A typical census collection district contains around 100 dwellings (the number of dwellings is much bigger in areas with high rise apartments). Each collection district has a known area so it's pretty easy to work out the density, in houses per hectare.

Working on the basis that cost of the NBN roll-out (principally the cost of trenching and the fibre itself) is directly proportional to how close houses are to each other -- where houses are close more are passed per km of trench dug -- the resulting plot is a good first pass approximation of which areas of Eastern Australia fall into 93% fibre, 5% wireless and 2% satelite.

My analysis is only an approximation, so please don't ask me to look up your address and say if you are inside or outside the 93%. The factor I can't account for is distance from an exchange. Purely as an example, 50 houses on ½ acre blocks 20km from the nearest exchange might cost more to connect than 50 houses on 5 acre blocks 10km from the exchange.

At 20km south of Darwin -- I presume you mean 20km from the centre, not the last street light -- will most likely be on wireless.