My turbulent ride with Australian Internet

Thu 16 April 2020

I've now lived in Australia for about 7 months. In that time I've had three ISPs. Yes, three. In the last 3 and a half years in New Zealand, I had one ISP. This, unfortunately, has enlightened me to the sad state of internet in Australia and made me realise how lucky a country like New Zealand is with its Fibre to the Home roll out.

When I first moved into my property here I looked at a range of providers. Unfortunately, the property wasn't in an NBN area (due next month), so the only options we had were ADSL, Optus Cable, or 4G Home Broadband. This ruled out some providers who are NBN only, such as the highly-rated Aussie Broadband. I was pretty tempted by Optus Cable, however, I didn't want to spend the $200 connection and installation fee as I was renting and NBN was coming within the year, and I didn't want to commit to a 24-month contract. So I decided I'd go with ADSL because it at least was unlimited data. I looked at companies like iinet, Internode, TPG and was all ready to sign up for Internode (because I wanted IPv6). Unfortunately, I was put off by the upfront cost and lead time. As Internode is owned by TPG, to get cheaper pricing due to "naked DSL" I'd have to wait up to 2 weeks to be moved to a TPG DSLAM.

I decided I wanted to avoid that, so instead, I looked at other options. I ended up settling on Telstra. The reasons for this were that they'd not charge me any connection fees, no contract, and they'd give me a modem that included 4G backup. This would allow me to have Wi-Fi at home right away and also if my DSL went down I'd be able to still have internet. Seemed like a good deal.

A couple of days later my Telstra modem arrived. We plugged it in, hooked up the phone line. Of course, as the ADSL hadn't been connected yet, the 4G backup kicked straight in. Awesome!

I kept a keen eye on the Telstra order tracker because the 4G backup got a little slow at night. Eventually, it said that I was connected. But ... no DSL sync. No matter, 4G backup will cover it until it's sorted. On the phone I get to Telstra technical support to lodge a fault, I queried whether it might be an issue with the addresses (my neighbour mentioned issues with getting services connected on the subdivided section). I was told one of the biggest lies I've ever heard "All of our lines are 100% perfectly connected". Yeah sure.

Anyway, fault lodged, I'll keep using the 4G unlimited backup. Or so I thought. A couple of days later even that stopped working. Contacted Telstra and am told, "oh you're out of data". I said well it's supposed to be unlimited. They agreed and added more data. That didn't help. Instead that evening I call them back and am given the usual restart the modem, etc, etc. They even tried to debug the DSL again. Eventually, they decide the modem must be broken.

New modem arrives, 4G backup works, no DSL. So a technician is scheduled. He comes to the house and then disappears to the exchange. Remember all those 100% perfectly connected lines? Not so 100% perfectly connected. He sorts that out and we're good to go. A week later, back to 4G backup, left it a couple of days and it resolved itself. No worries, worked like it should right? Two weeks later, 4G backup again. Leave it a week, still no DSL. Back on the phone, all the usual hassle and then a fault lodged. Next day ... no 4G backup either. Login to my account ... "No active services". I thought that was quite odd, so I queried Telstra.

They'd cancelled the account. Hey, when something might be too hard, just pretend it didn't exist. Over the next two months, I fought a battle with them, trying to return a modem, be credited back money for a service they never provided, and even an overdue bill notice. This all ended up with my lodging a formal complaint with Telstra.

At this point, I probably should have just gone with a TPG provider. But instead, I signed up with Exetel. Exetel themselves were great to deal with, however, Telstra strikes again. After two weeks, I still had no internet. This was despite multiple technicians being sent to the exchange. In the end, I cancelled and asked for a full refund. I had to return the modem as part of that.

I was at this point so frustrated, that my only viable option was to get 4G home broadband. I looked at Exetel, but they limit it to 12/1 Mbps. I considered Yomojo who are full speed but slightly cheaper than Optus. In the end, I just went direct with Optus. I figured it would be easier to get it straight from the network operator.

And since then I've had solid reliable internet. Now and then it slows down, but it generally works fine. The only issue I have is that 500GB can be a bit limiting, especially now we're working from home and watching a lot more Netflix. Their overage options are quite poor, but when your options are quite limited you take what you can get.

NBN becomes RFS at the end of next month. I thought hard about whether to stay on 4G (unfortunately I'm two houses outside of Optus 5G coverage, otherwise I'd snap that up in an instant) or change to the NBN. In the end, 500GB is too limiting for us, and we'll be getting an NBN connection. Now I just have to choose a provider.