Thread: Bigpond - Useless.

I hate to disallusion you Scott, but if the situation is actually as you describe, you are probably part of the 8% who wont get fibre as part of the NBN
It'll be wireless or satelite

Sigh, where do I start?

When I tried closing down account A and refused to pay them they kept that account open and it accumulated monthly charges and then even eventually interest.

When I accidentally paid account B twice and then closed it down, it took 18 months to get my money back.

At no stage would they contemplate combining my debt in A with my credit in B.

I finally got rid of any connection to them last year and twas indeed a time for celebration.

Originally Posted by ian

I hate to disallusion you Scott, but if the situation is actually as you describe, you are probably part of the 8% who wont get fibre as part of the NBN
It'll be wireless or satelite

Wouldn't surprise me Ian. But 40km from Melbourne CBD?

Here's my beef with Telstra (and it concerns teh intarwebz, so close enough to Bigpond it doesn't matter).

• Back in 1996ish, buy block of land in newly developing Canberra subdivision (Gungahlin)
• One of the selling points on the glossy brochures for the area is that it will have optical fibre connection for phone/internet purposes
• Build house, move in
• Get phone line...hummmm - just normal copper line, not optical
• Yeah...broadband idea was scrapped as the libs got in and tightened up Telstra's funding prior to privatisation...no one will ever need those sorts of speeds anyway
• Hey....new fangled 56k modem seems awfully slow...not even getting 33.6...more like 25k
• Try 'old' 33.6k modem. Nope, that doesn't get faster than 25k either
• Line tests are normal. Tech doing the test mentions that it won't get any faster
• Telstra has used new, cheaper 'pair gain' technology. This means they can run more connections without installing more capacity
• In essence, the phone line has half the capacity as a normal phone line, thanks to pair gain
• Wait a year while Telstra gets stocks of appropriate hardware to install ISDN; can finally get 48k out of the modem (ISDN itself being waaaaayyyy to expensive to use, like a buck per meg or something like that, but it was a sneaky way to get a better line)
• ADSL comes along - wooo-hoo, internet saviour!!!!
• Nope. ASDL won't work with pair gain
• ADSL is also severely limited by the RIMs (remote interconnect multiplexers) used to connect copper to fiber backhaul
• ADSL/RIM incompatibility compatibility known to Telstra since 2000.
• Telstra still installing ADSL blocking RIMs in the area as late as 2010

I'm sorry, but I'd kerb stomp them. With football boots.



What bugs me even more is there is probably a pointy-haired boss in Telstra who got a fat bonus for rolling out such a great money saving technology.


Twats.

When I had cable phone installed I cut teltra's wire to my house. Want nothing to do with them or their affiliates. When people ring to sell me some phone plan I ask who their carrier is, when they say telstra I say Bye bye got no wire, They think its funny to tell me I must have a wire or they couldn't be talking to me. I happily tell them that they need to think again.
Sick of the
We'll give you free line rental (if we can charge you triple phone call rates)
We'll give you $20 of free calls (if we can time charge you for local calls)
We'll give you free internet (if we sign you got huge line rentals and high call rates)
We'll give you it all (if we can get it back 3 times over somewhere else)

Teltra has a smell and its not good.

Simple fix for all Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman - TIO I worked for them
colbra

Originally Posted by colbra

Simple fix for all Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman - TIO I worked for them
colbra

Doesn’t work this could be the next step Carrier pigeon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
colbra

Originally Posted by sjt

Wouldn't surprise me Ian. But 40km from Melbourne CBD?

Scott
based on the NBN laying fibre to every town, the cost of the roll-out will be roughly proportional to the density of dwellings in an area.

Where the houses are closer together, you can connect more of them for every 1km of trench and fibre cable.
For example in my dad's street, houses typically have a 20m frontage and are set back about 20m from the street. So 1km of trench and fibre can connect roughly 25 houses. Travel less than 10km north of dad's place and the houses typically have a 100m frontage and are set back up to 200m from the street. So 1km of fibre would only connect around 3 or 4 houses, which implies a cost per house around 7x what it is in denser settled areas.

just for fun I used a geographic mapping program and the 2006 Census data (at the collection district level) to work out the number of dwellings per hectare for all of NSW, Victoria and Qld.
I was only mildly surprised to find how close to the centre of Sydney the 92% of dwellings cut-off line fell. Melbourne will no doubt be very similar.

telstra's suggestion of go get a wireless connection!!. Both major players are oversubscribed. I have friends in the country and they were fine for 12 months after the 3G network went in. Now they will get dropouts 8 times a day. Seems like if you want to get on (and it looks good to the person trying) someone already on gets kicked off. They complain daily but just keep getting told there is no fault.

Originally Posted by colbra

Simple fix for all Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman - TIO I worked for them
colbra

Colbra you are right on the money mate. The only way to get anywhere with these guys is to 'invoke' the ombudsman card. The longer they take to resolve a complaint via the ombudsman the more it cost them. Eventually they get to a point where it is cheaper to give you what you should have always had than pay the fee to the ombudsman.

Regards
Anthony

My provider is iprimus and they use Telstra lines and although I have experienced problems with the line from time to time, it is usually fixed in a reasonable time and they (iprimus) have to contact Telstra who carry out the repair. Strange world eh?

I dont know about any of the promises third part providers reveal,but Telstra owns the infrastructure ie copper wires exchanges etc,and they wholesale lines to third party provideres,so any problems Telstra have to fix .I've been with Telstra for over three years never had a minutes trouble with them.15 gb for 39,95 month

I too could tell you my experience with Bigpond and the faceless people who provide technical support to their network. Pretty well along the lines of the person who started this thread.

acmegridley think your getting ripped off but then it is Telstra.
I'm on Optus Cable so NOT telstra's copper.
39.95 (same price) but I get 120 GIG (50 from lunch to midnight and 70 from midnight to lunch). Plus I get every third month free.
Get maybe a couple of hours outage a year that I know of. It may go down overnight when I'm not there but then I don't care then.