I am thinking of installing broadband and there are many providers and all pushing their own modems, filters and splitters etc; Bigpond, Optus, iinet, iPrimus et al.  

The one I am most likely to sign up to is iinet light plan.

Does anyone have any experiences, favorable or unfavorable, with broadband providers and their equipment that they can share with me.

Well I've only ever been with Bigpond ADSL. Uptime has been pretty good this year. I say this year, as the previous year or so it was very bad - you would be blacked out for an entire afternoon, email would go missing etc etc. I think those issued have been ironed out now, due to the enormous negative press they received.

I'm online almost 10 hours a day, and it has only ever been down for about 30 minutes this year..

That said, isn't Bigpond the backbone of all other providers anyway? Maybe it's changed..

This is true but BigPond is so expensive compared to some other offerings.

To get the same deal from bigpond as iinet is offering, would cost an extra $50 month!

Hi again Cactus.
You probably already know about this site but if not, they have a good little engine to select the price you'de like to pay with the plan you'de like to have.  After looking at the results from that, it's essential to go into their forums and read what people's experiences with differant ISP's have been.  I got connected at a fast speed with a large data limit for a low price and later found out that the ISP has had a lot of troubles in other areas because I didn't bother to search the forums.  I've been really happy with it so far though and haven't had the problems that other people complained about.

http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum.cfm

Another thing of interest, the one thing I wasn't happy with was my initial connection speed but it turned out to be problems on my computer's end in the registry.  My ISP didn't tell me that but claimed that my initial low speed was within normal range.  I was able to double it.  Use at your own risk for broadband connections only:
http://www.speedguide.net/analyzer.php

I use AAPT broadband 512/64 with 12g download. @$70 per month including line and local calls.

Not a bad plan but wont be staying with them after contract is up in the new year, there are cheaper around.

Reccommend BC whirlpool as well, it is a very good site, another to look at if your considering broadband is a site called Phonechoice, very good as well but do have the VOIP plans and options and if your going to use broadband have a look at a VOIP/ BROADBAND combined deal.

http://www.phonechoice.com.au/index.cfm

Yeah, I've been on Whirlpool so I'll give phonechoice a go also ...but I really wanted to know what eBlah members thought.

My son has Internode on his and I use Iprimus. We have never had any problems with either. Setting it all up is costly. But once you are there, it is wonderful and you'll never go back. Just do your research well and get one that suits YOU.

AAPT have just released some new ADSL plans.  Might be worth a look!

I think you'll find Westnet is very competitive and provide a very good service, though I'm not sure how far they have got linked up in the Eastern states.

I have used Bigpond since 2001 with very little downtime.  It's so long since we had any that I don't remember the last time.  

We were a Bigpond customer for 4 years & in that time most problems that we had were Telstra's responsibility.
We had an ISDN connection that cost $100 to install, & $100, 5 phone calls, & 3 weeks notice to disconnect. Plus, although the modem was supplied by Telstra, they didn't directly support it & any problems were referred to a contractor.
My problem with Bigpond was I signed up for a 12 month dialup connection & a month later they started offereing the cheaper DSL accounts.
The moral of this essay is be careful of equipment that's not your ISP's problem & beware of long term contracts.

Quoted from Zilva_Zanga

My problem with Bigpond was I signed up for a 12 month dialup connection & a month later they started offereing the cheaper DSL accounts.

Bigpond is overpriced in my opinion.  It seems likely to me that any cheaper DSL plan would have only had a download cap that was designed to make you pay for extra data and that your web browsing would have been more expensive in the end.  No one wants to be counting data and worrying how much they use.
On price, there are some dirt cheap dial-up plans, but I don't know what sort of quality they offer or what the fine print is that they might also have fees that aren't apparent in a commercial.
I was paying $25 a month for dial-up, and let me say that the cheaper advertised broadband plans, by the big companies anyway, can offer mcuh less data transfer before they start charging extra than what I was using on a dial-up modem.  I was really supprised how fast bits and peices on dial up can add up over the course of a mongth.  Okay so now I have a 512/128 plan with no contract for $39 a month and I have a 25 Gig limit and if I exceed that then I don't get charged extra but just slowed down to dial-up speed.  I beleive that with another company I could have had 1500/512 or something like that for only $10 more but they required a contract and at $39 I'm not spending any extra money after accounting for local call costs but with $49 I was unsure.  I also do not think that I will ever worry about hittting that 25 gig limit.  Even if I were breaking copyright infrigement laws and downloading an extra 3 gigs a week in illegal movies then I would still not be that worried.  Last month I dowloaded, in addition to web surfing, 2 linux distros, got off my butt on my other partition and updated XP, and listened to probably 48 hours of shoutcast streams at 128 Kbps or higher, uploaded in a torrent, for a while anyway, of a Linux distro set to send at a low 5 Kb/s but I'm not sure if anyone actually used it or not and only used around 4 to 6 gigs.  I forget exactly now, but it was hardly anything to worry about.
TGP has the higher speed DSL for lower price with I think a 6 month contract and last I heard were offering a free modem with it.  The download limit is I think 15 or 20 Gigs then slowed to dialup speeds.  I don't know if they charge for technical support.  They seem to have fairly happy customers though.

My plan is with Curl Communications.  Setup was expensive but $39 a month is a good price for what I get.  Tech support is free but they were rude as hell on one occasion and fairly rude on the other, must be a small company... it's still worth the money.  They are a reseller of Veridas and there are other ISP's that are also resellers of Veridas that might be competitive.  Veridas has been scrutinised for various reasons and this is why I didn't post prices or plans the first time.  I'de recommend reading other sources about it, such as the links provided, before signing up because differant people have differant needs.  I don't need low pings for gaming for example.  I've seen a lot of complaints about the Veridas network but few have been by people living in Sydney where I am and I know that some are people who became bitter and just won't shut up about it and troll broadband forums with it while others are legitamate.  Some complaints are damning while others are simple.  My service has been good but it's been for only over a month to gauge.

I have Bigpond ADSL 256/64 broadband unlimited for $59.95 a month.

It is a bit pricey compared to others. But it is reliable and I did not had any problems since signing up last January.

I went with Bigpond because they gave me a free modem worth $170.00 at the time. And no setup fee. However nothing is really free. I had to sign up on a 24 months plan to get that deal.

By having my phone with Telstra, I also get 50 free local calls per month as part of the deal. I think I also pay $59.95 instead of $69.95 by having my phone with Telstra.

The only thing which piss me off is that it seem that Bigpond won't give you a cable connection unless you already have the cable for Foxtel. I think that it is mean. But on the other hand, I am sure that they would charge you at least 100 bucks to bring the cable to your house if you really wanted it.

I switched to Broadband a while ago and are very happy with it..I looked into all the providers and finally settled on IINET.   I am on the $49.95 plan which costs me $39.95 because I switched my phone to them as well. There was absolutely no set up costs with free modem/router, as my wife has her own PC.  The speed is very fast, starting at 12,000kps and I am allowed 2 gig peak,and 2 gig offpeak a month download (which is ample for me)..If you should go over its no extra cost,they just put you on 56k speed for the rest of that month...

I can thoroughly recommend them...