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Australia's Largest ISP Ditches Linux Mirror
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's largest ISP, BigPond, has decided to ditch its local mirrors of Linux and other open source operating systems, as well as various other open source software and Creative Commons media. BigPond posted a terse update on the service's website, citing reasons of low popularity and the existence of better services like download.com and Tucows. BigPond customers are not impressed by the move, given that the ISP is infamous in Australia for its high prices and relatively low monthly quotas of bandwidth (many users are on 10GB or 25GB per month plans) and all downloads from this service did not count towards their monthly limits."
This only applies if you are willing to stay on dial up or you are in a heavily populated area. If you are in rural Australia your options tend to be limited to Telstra BigPond for broadband or you stay with narrowband services.
The reason they weren't popular is because the mirrors sucked, they were often slow to get updates and they were slow generally. I can get better speeds from the Netherlands than I can from my local Bigpond Mirror.
It's what you get when you partly privatise a government monopoly and then pretend the government has nothing to do with it anymore but make it difficult for anyone else to compete.
Well that's right. Unless you have *absolutely* no other choice there is no reason to sign up with Bigpond and you are best off going with another provider with unmetered mirrors like Internode.
I grudgingly will say that in spite of it being Telstra owned and expensive their 850MHz HSDPA network is frickin' excellent. If you are on a bitumen road in Australia (and a lot of dirt roads), you will get snappy 3G with them.
So a mirror is shutting down. What's big deal?
The problem is that people on Telstra Bigpond pay top dollar for an internet connection with a fairly low download allowance (in the order of 10GB per month), using this mirror means they can download a multi gigabyte Linux distro without subtracting from their pitifully low download allowance. These days they slow your internet speed when you exceed your allowance, but at one stage they used to change 17c per MB once you reached your allowance (counting both uploads and downloads) and unsuspecting people ended up with internet bills worth thousands.
Or satellite. For casual users, it isn't that bad.
Learn to love Alaska
Don't be an idiot.
Bigpond is the only provider who will give me reasonable speed. I can't get ADSL2. I can get ADSL, but I'm almost 4.5k from an exchange. There are no other cable providers aside from Bigpond, for my area.
So my options are: Bigpond cable, Dialup, satellite, ADSL. And of those, only bigpond give me semi-reliable, semi-fast net. The cap is crap (25 gig). and it's expensive. But it's the only real option.
"No linux user uses bigpond, Friends don't let friends use bigpond" seriously, don't be a douche. Some people don't really have much of a choice.
The mirror was slow to get the files you wanted, but once it was up there I could download it as fast or faster then from the 'official' mirrors. (Ubuntu, fedora, CentOS). And it was especially good because I could download several ISO files totalling well over 25 gig and not get capped by Bigpond for it.
Taking the mirror offline will be a pain.
Another reason for BigPond: you can't get DSL connected by anyone else, but BigPond miraculously can. Go with them and churn after the first few months. I've seen it happen before.