Pity Broadband Users In Australia

danwarne writes: "Pity Australians who have few other choices for their broadband internet than the country's incumbent telco Telstra. A broadband community website, Whirlpool, has revealed that the giant telco is planning to RAISE prices on broadband again for the second time in just a few months. The telco, which has had a technically disastrous ADSL rollout is also going to be offering incentives for customers to sign up to its cable internet service (HFC) instead, in the form of faster plans for cable customers (until now most customers -- cable and ADSL -- have been limited to 512Kbit download speeds). It seems clear from Telstra's plans that they are preparing to abandon the 'messy' residential broadband market and focus on more profitable business customers." In the next few weeks, lucky Australians will find out if this "leak" is accurate.

Comments

Optus

[smallstepforman]

Thank god for Optus. Its cheaper than the gov. sponsored Telstra, it doesn't have ridiculous caps, its faster than Telstra and the service is hassle free. In neighbourhoods where both Optus and Telstra have rolled out cables, Optus is mopping the floor with Telstra guts. Unfortunately, only portions of large metropolitan areas have access to Optus cable.

Quick question - why is Slashdot so interested in DownUnder? Most of these telco idiosynchrocies come from Telstra, not Optus.

Re:Optus

[MicklePickle]

Yep, I have been on Optus for over a year now. All the other people I know of who joined Telstra have had terrible problems with reliability, download speeds, and funky bandwidth forming.

On Optus it's open slather pretty much. During the early period there was even no download limit at all. People had Rx rates in the 200G a week.

Re:Optus

[Stormie]

Unfortunately, only portions of large metropolitan areas have access to Optus cable.

Also Optus only provide cable to houses, not apartments. When I enquired about getting connected, as soon as they heard the slash in my address, they said no. Apparently it costs slightly more to hook up an apartment (longer wire needed, I guess) and since they're overflowing with demand, they ignore all apartment dwellers in favour of the more profitable house dwellers.

So here I am with Telstra, wondering if my bill is about to go up $6/month as this rumour would have it. :-(

Re:Optus

[NightRain]

It's available in Brisbane as well, so the 3 major cities are covered.

Ray.

Re:Optus

[NightRain]

Not quite. The problem is more to do with the fact that Optus does not want the expense of wiring up units because it's just not worth their time and money when they can't know how many people will be using it in each lot of units.

And they are hardly rejecting unit dwellers from over demand. See this thread on WP. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t =1630972932

They're actually shutting down nodes, which to me says that they're not interested in being in the game for too much longer.

Ray.

Go wireless

[jamesbromberger]

Help the free public wireless networks: Perth, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide,Sydney, Gold Coast (QLD), Tasmania, etc.

ADSL in other countries

[muffen]

If you think that Australia has it bad, take a look at how Broadband is doing in Ireland. The prices are like USD100/month for a 512/128 kbit connection with a 3 GIG DL LIMIT!!!!

If you feel sorry for broadband users in Australia, I don't think I have words for what you should feel for broadband users in Ireland.

Re:PLEASE don't pitty me!

[Boiling_point_]

Yeah, but your volume allowance is 500 megabytes per month. That's not as useful to many potential customers; I suspect paying ~US$60 a month for 500mb would send a shiver down the spine of many /. readers.

Interesting footnote - the company director of XIS, one of only two companies in .au offering realistic competition to Telstra, is still a teenager. I hope he's up to the task, launching a broadband service nationwide the same week that Telstra raise their prices!!

Broadband in Ireland

[Draoi]

Consider yourselves lucky, guys. Here in Ireland we're still struggling with ISDN as being the 'broadband' solution, both for home and business users. And this is almost entirely down to the national telco (eircom) delaying and delaying on the rollout of (A)DSL. It really sux. I'm typing this over ISDN using both B channels. It costs me the price of a local call ($.05) X 2 every THREE MINUTES. And all for a massive 128K bandwidth! Whoopee!! 8-b

[grumble, growl]

For more details on Ireland's Broadband issues, check out Ireland Off-Line

Irelands situation is far worse

[Gavintheman]

At least the people of Oz can get residential broadband! As of yet there are are no ADSL or similar products available to the residential market in Ireland. When it was originally proposed, the old semi-state monopoly, the now privatized Eircom, was going to charge 130 per month for a 512k with a 3GB cap! The regulator wants this reduced and ADSL rollout has been delayed yet again. Cable on the other hand is sold by NTL to a small area of Dublin city. Help us out at www.irelandoffline.com

Not horrible, just mixed

[dirk]

While I agree the terms aren't all that great, the changes are both good and bad, not the horrible tragedy the article makes them out to be. Cable is going up to "full speed" (with no explanation of what that is), and is probably done because of the restrictions with DSL. It's a lot easy to get cable speed up high than DSL, and I can't blame them for emphasizing DSL over cable (as long as they offer both, who cares?).

The lowest plan will include move MB and be cheaper on DSL (while cable prices stay the same). The extra MB charge will also drop. This is nothing but good.

The 1GB plan is a bad value no matter which service you use apparently.

The 3GB plan will be increasing by $6 for DSL and $15 for cable, but the excess MB prices is dropping. Seems this is worse for cable, not DSL.

The 5GB and 10GB is staying the same except the excess MB charge is dropping. Seems this is good for everyone.

Seems like DSL is actually getting off pretty good here. Yes, they don't get the "full speed", but they get a price break at the lowest level, and the one service that is going up is going up less than cable. And all excess MB charges are going down for both services. Maybe it's because I'm not from Australia and don't know anything about Telstra, but this seems like a more toward being better, not worse.

Good time to announce this - 4 day ADSL outage

[Nailer]

lon32, a router in Telstra's Lonsdale St exchange in Victoria which these days handles ADSL connection has been down, according to Telstra's 1800 support number, for for days leaving a few hundred business ADSL uusers without connectivity for 95% of the time since Friday morning (its Tuesday Morning now). The Service Status page doesn't acknowledge this particular outage (though it does acknowledge three others).

I work for a IT Services customer and its worth noting the amount of problems customers who use ADSL ISPs with Telstra as their upstream provider have in comparison to others, particularly ISPs reselling RequestDSL (eg, BRD) or NC/Alternet (Netspace).

I'm no lawyer, but I know if someone wants to launch mass legal action against Telstra for this kind of shit then quite a few customers would be interested.