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...

I finally hooked up to iinet broadband and I'm using a old ethernet card I salvaged from one of my old computers, but the speed is still very pleasing against the old dialup.   eBlah opens in a second and the Picture Chase thread opens with all the pictures already downloaded ...no waiting ...yeehah!

That must be a great feeling to not have to wait around so much.

Here's some links if you don't already have them.
http://www.testmy.net/ To see how fast you're actually getting.  You may have to disable your firewall if it wont run.  If you use pppoe then the best you can expect is 90% of your download speed limit.  This server is also overseas and I always get a little slower than what I get in fast downloads.  There's a message forum there as well and some suggestions if you aren't getting close to your potential.  I didn't find that forum useful though.

I was getting about half my potential and I found http://www.speedguide.net/ helpfull.  On the left hand side there are links and one is a TCP/IP analyzer.  It can suggest a better RWIN or receive window value if you actually need it.  If you don't then it's best left alone.  They also have some patches for problems including one for 98 that can cause speed degredation over time, in some cases causing a complete halt.  Everything is a registry change.  It has a good tool to download that will change some values for you if you need it done but you need to read a little on the site too to make sure you set it correctly.

If you want a quick bookmark to get a general idea of how fast your connection is at a certain time then http://homepage.tinet.ie/~leslie/testpage.htm is a good quicky if you don't need terribly accurate results.

I have a program that runs in the tray called DU meter.  It's time limited shareware PM me if you want details on where the homepage etc etc etc and etc.  It runs in the tray and set up properly (usually is by default) measures your data downloads and uploads.  My Isp has a counter but it seems to only be accurate 2 days ago at midnight.  It will display a graph of data downloaded and uploaded when you click on it in the tray and if you want to run the graph often it's resizable and can be made to various levels of transparancies if you run it in XP.  It can be set to reset itself at the start of each month and to give you a warning when you are approaching your limit.

Forgot, don't be dissapointed if you find out that most webpages don't load near as fast as your speed potential... it's the server you're hitting, not your connection or your ISP.  

And if you see that you have a lot of leftover badwidth at the end of the month, don't forget to visit shoutcast.com and even consider downloading the Savecast plugin for winamp.

Now I am jealous cactus!

But you do have to sacrifice something to make the extra costs.

i use to use bigpond ( prepaid ) disc ...this is when i first started just to test things out on the net ..and i thought that was a major ripoff , even @ being new to it all !

then went to bigpond dial up 56k , i wanted broadband @ the time , but certain circumstances would'nt allow me then.  bwa wa wa  

then got sick of the slow internet and the double charge of redialing everytime it disconnected ( which, @ the time was a totally unacceptable amount )

finally moved to optus cable broadband ( yaayy ,no dumb dialing up ), ( 3 gig p.mth plan ) which later on went to 12 gig p.mth plan @ no extra cost and decided by optus ,not me ..( also really enjoyed the festive period of an extra 8 g p.mth for free - which made it 20 g now that lasted for 3 month's i think it was ?  i only bet it once   as i went interstate for some of it  

now i'm on the 20g p.mth ( with 40 g free time between midnight & midday ) a really good move i thought from optus ( it use to be 2.00 am til 9.00 am ).?
and i'm certainly making the most of it  

if i start falling behind on my usage, then i'll just go back to the 12 g plan ...it's no big problem ...even 12 's quite handy.

i would'nt touch Telstra again with a 30 foot pole

anywayz
i hope your enjoying your broadband Cactus - now you can see why people simply can't go back to 56 k  lol  

Telstra refuses to upgrade our exchange for ADSL. I am in a ADSL blackspot! I have installed wireless broadband 512/512, and have had no serious troubles. I have also set up a wireless network in my home and I found out that the router reaches the neighbours. So talks are in progress, and hopefully they will pay for time online! I think that will work great for me!

I'm getting ADSL 2+ next month. They said I should expect 1MB/sec downloads :drool:

How much is it going to cost and what's the data limit and stuff?  And who's it with?  I didn't know it was available.

If you had a lot of stuff you wanted, wooooo... there goes all your bandwith in one day
It's like filling an entire CD every 12 minutes if your hitting your max speed all along.  What's the upload rate btw?  And careful to throttle you uploads in torrents if it counts toward your data limit or if it might use peering that is going to count toward it.

I have a dream where one day everyone has incredible speed broadband and sets aside 10% of their drive for serving on the internet and all lots of middle people are cut out of the expense and no one hacks things or writes viruses... not quite as good as the other "I have a dream" speech.  I'll figure out how it helps like... starving people in the third world and get back to everyone though

I have been with iinet broadband since last august, it was fantastic up till around christmas, I was getting around 1000kbps.  Since then I am only getting around 400 kbps average speed.  It is still fast compared to dial-up, but disappointing compared to what I had.
They say they are looking into it...........

Quoted from Lawnbowler

I have been with iinet broadband since last august, it was fantastic up till around christmas, I was getting around 1000kbps.  Since then I am only getting around 400 kbps average speed.  It is still fast compared to dial-up, but disappointing compared to what I had.
They say they are looking into it...........

Get onto your provider and get them to show you how to do a deeper search for spyware. . . you start by pressing Ctrl - Alt - Delete- all down at once. . . check the small screen that appears with 'cookie' names in it. . your provider will tell you which ones are not good and delete them.
Then you take a screen capture pic. . and you can refer back to it when you do your own regular maintainance.
The 'spies' you delete will make your PC run so much faster. . and without the 'hitch-hikers'.

I have Telstra 256/56? But still when pulling torrents the max speed is still 29kps and STILL the net works slow. Hoping to go to TPG soon unless something cheaper comes along.
I agree with meandean : Telstra a WAY overpriced. And considering the amount of people employed to operate a broadband facility compared with phone lines, I reckon we all should get it for next to nothing!!! dream on.

In the States there is no limit to download...........

Quoted from Tasman

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.

Westnet is in the Eastern States with an advertising campaign blitz. I signed up after a little research and as they say their service is second to none (they win heaps of service awards).

Then I hit the wall when I accessed their news server. I spend a lot of time on news servers for various groups I have hobbies in (gardening and motorbike touring) plus lets face it bulk access to lots pics of naked women.

First thing I noticed was just how few newsgroups they had compared to my previous ISP's, and then the worse thing was I couldn't get any post greater than 512 lines. After lots of talking to their help line (they were polite and bent over backwards) with customer rep after rep saying they didn't restrict their news groups in any way, I finally got onto a manager after insisting they must. He said because of legal reasons they do restrict all news posts to 32kb. Now I was livid because if I'd known this I would not have signed up with Westnet.

Turns out their legal reasons have nothing to do with content but being threatened with legal action because of the illegal file downloads going on through newsgroups. This is a stupid excuse because the same thing can be achieved throught the web or by things like Kaaza and Bit Torrent but they don't restrict them. So the only conclusion I can come to is they know newsgroups are a simple way of bulk downloading (you can even schedule to download overnight in offpeak time) so it's easy to reach their monthly data limit. So to limit bandwidth usage they restrict newsgroups posts.

On advice from the manager, I searched for free newsgoups to use. Anyone who has gone through this route knows the frustration and fleeting life of free newsgroups. Anyway I finally found a couple of good free ones but after a few days noticed how slow they were downloading and were now on a 10 to 15 minute cycle of being disconnected, no matter what stay alive setting I had in my news client. Long story short, I checked with some friends and they had no problems with the exact same newsgroups through their ISP's (a local, AAPT and Optus).

I have since tried to get out of the contract with no costs, and Westnet have refused to come to the party, just saying I can achieve what I want through other areas of the Internet. I have made a formal complaint saying that they should clearly state in their advertising, brochures, internet site and contract that they restrict newsgroups to 32kb per post. This is not stipulated anywhere and none of their customer reps know this is in place.

So if you ever want to use newsgroups do not sign up to Westnet.

We have iinet adsl. it is the best. we have heaps of download space etc, costs $50 a month. it's really good!
my friend has iprimus that is bad. so is dodo.
get iinet. the best. my dad works in computers he picked it lol. it's good.
iinet is the best.

I have iiNet ADSL 2.

I get my ADSL2 though Adam Internet.

OMG!
Drool at the monthly fee after googling that:
http://www.adam.com.au/products_home_adam_direct.php

Expensive all the other costs though.

I think the cheapest ADSL2 I can get in Sydney would start at $100+ which is too much to pay for an internet connection.

It's really cheap, and it's way better than Bigpond's offering of the standard ADSL.

Too bad that I got capped to 64k after 7 days . I only had a 5GB cap, but I might see if we can get it up to 10 GB. It's only 5 bucks more.

Im one of the lucky ones  - I aint with anybody

Im connected via direct optical link thru my work network  no $ and no download limit

currently 20,000kbs

No fair

Hi all,

Soz if i'm reviving an old thread but I could resist letting you all kow about another valuable website that contains heaps of info on Broadband ADSL.


http://www.broadbandguide.com.au/

I actually signed to ADSL2+ Plan through them. They list Australia's top Broadband Internet Service Providers and have heaps of valuable resources.

For example. Test your Internet Speed HERE, or new users can sift through hundreds of FAQs, Guides and Conversion Tables using their Broadband Help Centre HERE.

Anyway, I found it useful and thought I'd pass on the info. Cheers

Hi

I thought this was another good Aussie site for broadband information:

high speed internet providers

Might be helpful to a few people

Quoted from Tasman

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.

Westnet is excellent (most of the time anyway)

The major problem I had was mine was connection drop outs. Apparently it had something to do with my brand of cordless phone (Unidec) so I had to get a splitter and it stops most dropouts.

I changed to 'Chariot' in the last few months. I pay by Bpay at $40. per fortnight, ahead of time, which is my choice. I get 40GB for $79.95 per month. No fee for uploads (unlike BigPond) I have never had a 'drop out' (can you get drop outs with ADSL). I am on the 2nd fastest speed which is damned quick. Their head office is in in Adelaide. They have been established for over 12 years. I don't drink, smoke, gamble, or socialise outside my home much and this is my treat for me. I can recommend Chariot to anyone who wants reliable ADSL at a decent price.

Hi, you might find this useful, it lists prices for most home and wireless broadband plans http://www.broadbandexpert.com.au

Thats interesting RichP

and I notice iinet deal is different to westnet deal even though they have taken over that company!!!!!

I'd warn anyone against iinet, I kicked off ADSL when OzEmail launched their service (around 2002 I think), when iinet took them over it went straight to hell!

BUT...I have been with iinet, forever

and they always were good for me.

I have problem now with telstra..and getting a decent phone line that will carry any internet  

And I have been with Telstra for years and love them!  I guess there's not one carrier to please everyone...

iinet have always been good for me, been with them 5 years.