ISP problems for the better?

[Extasey]

I'm so happy.

Recently we've had a lot of problems with our service provider and were forced to switch over to Telstra (from Optus) in the end.
Now, for some reason, Optus has credited us close to $380. We had a bill of $90 that we refused to pay because of problems with the service, and pretty much because of them not being able to provide their service. They must have credited this bill four times over.
This credit was immediately moved over to a mobile phone account

Two days ago a bloke from Telstra, our new ISP, telling me that our bill was extremly high and wanted to put us on a bundle. We were already in a bundle, or so we thought. Apparently there was an error with the bundle so they canned it and didn't notify us. According to the bloke talking to me, the bundle we were on never existed. Work that out :S It's not like I have time to sit around making up plans for myself, then talk the person who calls us and offers the service into putting me into that bundle.
Anyway, the new bundle this bloke put us on is much, much cheaper and has over 12x our old speed. 12 TIMES!!
This was because our exchange was recently updated to be ADSL2+ compadible, I never expected that to happen, ever! (Rural area).

Anyway, had to share my amazement that some of my ISP problems have worked out for the better. Normally it ends up in a large bill that never gets paid.

Spoiler (Click to View)

[Jordan L.]

12.45Mb/s :O
That's amazing!

[Extasey]

Especially for rural Australia

[Jordan L.]

Jee, mines like, 1mb/s.

[Kharnage]

HEY GUYS!

I would like some compliments.

[Gone]

HEY GUYS!

I would like some compliments.

Show off /jokes

That is amazing for rural area period. i can only guess how bad aussie is (Tim's told me)

[Extasey]

Its disgusting.
Australia has some of the worst interenet speeds in the world! The average for my area is 512kb/sec. and thats a good speed!
If you want to even come close to competing with another country you would have to pay mega bucks, which is pretty much multi-national companies only!
Kevin Rudd (our d-bag prime minister) said he was going to fix it and spend millions of dollars doing so... but that hasn't happened yet, amongst many other things!

[DAMINK™]

Im with telstra also Extasey. Glad to hear you pissed off Optus. There a useless bunch of pricks i tell ya.
As for speeds. Well i did a test and it was crap.



But an ok one i did recently was this?



In all honesty though. I have had nothing but trouble with telstra for the last year.
Great uptime dont get me wrong but.....
We did the bundle also. Home, 2 Mobiles, net and foxtel.
Now all of these are on set amounts. Except home phone and mobiles.
Now long story short but every month telstra had been adding loads to our bill.
One bill alone there were around 130 errors on the bill!! Yes 130 errors. All in there favor of course.
Anyway they sent me a bill for 4 thousand and change just before Christmas.
Well i told them where to go and after some fighting back and forth i got the telecommunications ombudsman involved.
Well they suspended all payments of all bills. Checked through everything and after a few days telstra rang me and said they would waver all bills and start from clean again. lol. Dickheads.
Now we just got our first bill. $500 and change. Well we payed it obviously and actually payed a bit more just to test the ground.
Well we got another bill for slightly over $300 still owed on the bill. Now this is back at the telecommunications ombudsman as i post this and i expect another waver of bills.
This time however i am going to go to a few local rags and offer them the story as i have documented fact they had and still are ripping me off every month.

Bloody telstra!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Good luck with them mate.

[Extasey]

They're all freakin useless!
Don't get me started with optus! we had a nightmare!
They service our house for close to 15 years! Then one day some champ calls up and says "lets go wireless, it'll be 8mb/sec and tons cheaper!"
We thought "fudge, thats awesome! Jump on that right now!"
The speeds turned out to be 65kb/sec and we couldnt share the internet between computers! So they sent us out a router/modem, which had strict NAT settings, meaning I couldn't play my xbox online! I asked them how to do it and they said the only possible way was to void warranty and they wouldn't tell me how too!
In the end we said "Can we go back to our old plan?" and they said "Sorry, your house doesn't exist! We've never serviced you guys at all!"
WTF??
This was because of telstra having a tiff with optus so the lines could not be used anymore (telstra lines). when optus moved us over to wireless they wiped us clean off their database of wired users!
We told them to get fudged, refused to pay bills, then moved over to optus.

[manipulate]

A little information for the rest of you guys:
Australia's current primary source for residential broadband is ADSL, we have a fairly good ADSL infrastructure and our cable infrastructure well...isn't that great, so lets start off with the fact that you can't get that much data down an ADSL line, it's not just the ISPs being greedy, and then there's the fact that we just don't get good bandwidht heading our way, I mean it's a series of underwater tubes connecting us to the other side of the world, we aren't going to get USish speeds that easily.
The Prime Minister of Australia has decided to build a more stable, more reliable and overall 'better' infrastructure that should allow us to have better speeds, there is even some talk about a FTTN or FTTC network being built, this is a major operation so we're looking at four years AT LEAST.