It's been on the blink for bloody years and years. It was one of the
reasons (and believe me I had a few reasons I had to go with them at
all, since I lived 'off the grid' (socially, not geographically) and
didn't even have a bank account for close to a decade, and they were one
of the few that would go with billing and paying by the month)
It wouldn't work for cable customers at all but would for adsl and every
time I rang them about it they would say either 'it's working' (despite
big threads on whirlpool that it wasn't) or worse still they'd say 'this
is the tech advice line, this is only for where you ring up if you can't
configure your modem or something' or other nonsense - in other words
there isn't actually any real process (or wasn't back then not too many
years ago) to report problems that are clearly at THEIR end (like the
fact that any time a shaped account was slowed, it'd regularly
experience server time outs and not let you download your emails if
there was more than about 5-6 (and I was getting about 50-100 per day)
as it'd take too long and get a time out. Why the **** they slowed the
email side of things I'll never know, since it's direct to bigpond, no
need for bandwith outside of there. Occasionally you'd get honest people
on the tech line and they'd say 'look we are aware of the issue, we keep
telling them, but they mumble mumble mumble (reading between the lines
they were saying 'we are reporting it but nobody gives a **** and has no
plans or capability to fix it).
A good friend of mine is upper management at telstra and he has told me
that when Sol came in, he was tasked with getting everyone onto the new
billing scheme. Much of the stuff he did completely fucked everything
else about the service, but he and his crew just kept using the wanker
analogy 'look if you have a race car, even if it crosses the finish line
first, upside down, on its roof and on fire, you have done the job'. I
just wish someone had told them 'yes and then you move on and we have to
rebuild a race car, a driver has either died or will spend the next
decade getting skin grafts and in enormous pain, and the team will go
bankrupt, but 'hey' we won the race right?
And that's about the size of it. He genuinely expects it could take till
post 2020 before it is fully sorted, so much harm and butchery was done.
I'm not going to say it is perfect, but a mate and myself (at separate
locations) both went to TPG adsl. I even went to the trouble of now
having both a bank account AND a credit card (the one thing previously
preventing me from switching). There's been the odd day or two here and
there that the service (including usenet) has been up and down, but
particularly rarely, and I'm BLOODY happy with the price/value for
money.
Most of the stuff I do on the net is text/information related (yes I'm
the 0.001% of internet users who didn't get online primarily for porn!)
though I do download/live stream some motorsport stuff (all legally of
course) and I'm happy with it all. I don't know how well tpg does usenet
in general, but the groups I read/post to (not many I'll admit) are aus.
based mostly, and I don't seem to be missing anything.
