Can_of_Worms::opened !!!

I received this tweet on Friday;

Talk about opening your proverbial can of worms !!

What can Bigpond to to “get my business” – not the sort of question that you get every day, especially from a company like Telstra.

It’s only because of who asked the question (@JonoH) that I’m even taking the time to consider the question.

Those that know me know full well how my “relationship” with Telstra has been rather “strained” over the years – excessively high pricing and shoddy customer service mainly, and that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned 1223 voice recognition service !

But since the question has been asked, and out of respect for the person who asked it, I thought I’d try to put some facts and figures together to see how their current ADSL plans stack up against my current provider.

My current ISP is Exetel – many people will berate them because of their support (which I don’t need), but there are two reasons I stick with them.

First is pricing – I get an ADSL1 connection (8192 down, 384 up – in reality not much better than 7100 down, 384 up), 36Gb of data between 12:00 and 02:00, and another 54Gb of data between 02:00 and 12:00 – all for $79/month. Throw in a free VoIP number ($0.10 untimed calls nationally) and a VoIP Fax number (fax/email gateway – $0.01 a page) and it’s a good package. And uploaded data IS NOT COUNTED.

Add to all of the above a very reasonable charge of $3.00 per Gigabyte if I go over either limit (which I occasionally do when a new Linux distro needs downloading) and I have an affordable package. Shaping is not an option, as I do a lot of remote support for companies and friends, and at $3/Gb I know how much I’m going to have to pay.

Second – the service. Exetel block NOTHING – they sell me a data connection and what I do with it is up to me. I can run my own webserver, mail server, SQL databases, SMTP server – virtually whatever I like that I can accomplish with that ADSL conenction. The only proviso is that I do nothing ILLEGAL with it – if I do they’ll hang me out to dry if I get caught, and rightly so too. They resell ADSL1 bandwidth from Optus  because the ADSL2 DSLAM in my exchange is Telstra and they don’t wholesale ADSL2 to anyone else (or didn’t until recently).

Let’s see what Bigpond can offer for the same speed and data.

Checking their ADSL1 plans, I find I can get my 100Gb of monthly data for $129.95 – already $50/month more than Exetel. No VoIP, no fax, nothing. And uploaded data is COUNTED as part of your data cap, whereas Exetel ignore what you upload.

Add to that you get shaped to 64kbps if you hit the monthly data limit, essentially making the service useless for anything but basic email – remember the bad old days of dial-up ?

So to @JonoH’s question – what can Bigpond do to get my business ?  Here’s a list;

More as they come to mind.