Switched home broadband to Telstra

We've had Optus cable internet here at the house for many years. It's been a reliable service but over time annoyances build up in a relationship like this so I decided to upgrade and switch to Telstra Bigpond on a service they claim can deliver up to 30Mbps down and 1Mbps up.

Optus gave me 8Mbps down and 256kbps up. The slow upload did cause me some grief sending mail and uploading.

These days Telstra sends out contractors to do any "hard" work and in this case it was Silcar Communications. The guys did a great job and didn't mind me taking a few pictures as the job progressed.

They had to run another cable from the pole as I refused to let them cut over the Optus cable.

I'm pretty happy with the performance so far, of course it will be interested to see how it degrades in busy times. Here's my test results from ozspeedtest.

Broadband Speed Test Results

Test run on 09/05/2008 @ 02:38 PM

Mirror: Telstra Bigpond
Data: 9 MB
Test Time: 3.28 secs

Your line speed is 23.02 Mbps (23024 kbps).
Your download speed is 2.81 MB/s (2878 KB/s).

I'm seeing some pings under 10ms to Australian sites and I really do get 1Mbps upload which is great.

I refused the netgear wireless router they offered and just took a motorola cable modem and I chose to use my Airport Extreme which seems to be working nicely.

It's always amusing to see how these folks respond to a house without windows. They are drilled in the art of telling windows users to reboot to make things work. I said, this is a Mac, you don't need to reboot.

So, why did I switch from Optus:

• They decided to charge me $2 per month because I wouldn't agree to direct debit. I always pay promptly by bpay and I'd be happy to have electronic invoicing, but no dice.


• A sales person came to the door trying to sell me a worse deal than I was currently on, much less data, a little more speed and more money.


• When my modem died in a storm, I purchased a replacement on ebay (from another optus customer), despite this they insisted on sending out a tech to read them the Mac address - something I can certainly do, and charged me the same amount as a replacement modem.

Oh and don't try writing to them about anything, when I did I just got back a form letter FAQ. I don't think they even read letters from customers. Oh well, bye bye Optus. Let me know when you're rolling out fiber.

Update: Cancelling Optus was a good experience. When you ring to cancel you get the 'A' team, the retention people. He said, "you should have rung us first, we could have given you $30 a month for 6 months". I explained that I had rung, and written, and had not been satisfied.

Anyhow he was able to cancel me right away and refund my latest payment. "Speed isn't everything" he said. You're right there, I thought...

Update 2: We are now without a home phone. The plan was also to churn our home phone over to Telstra today as well. The tech was due to come in "the morning", at 2pm they rang to say that they couldn't come and needed to re-shedule. I suggested next week.

Our home phone has been disconnected by Optus, not sure if it's related to the internet switch-over or the churn of the line to Telstra. Very annoying. Currently talking to Optus via Skype.

Ok, Optus has turned it back on. Strange that a churning phone can be disconnected before being connected to the new carrier. I guess I'm being punished for being pesky.