Bigpong oz

[adam.tropics]

Would there happen to be any other bigpond australia broadband customers on these forums??? Have you found them to be reliable and solid or are you currently rolling around in fits at the very suggestion!

[Aryxa]

I am with Bigpond. I have cable. I have had about 2-3 days of a solid 3-4 hour blocks of timeouts in 2 years. Pretty good if you ask me.
They are good as most of the time I will go over my 10gig download limit a month and my speed will not be reduced to 64kbps.

I have heard horror stories from other people I know in oher parts of the country though.

HTH :)

[adam.tropics]

I think we're a tad unlucky in the north in general with regard to many things 'technical'!! However, I should just like to point out that the 'Bigpong' thing was a genuine typo, I swear to god!!

Still......having said that,......on the bandwidth limits , yes they have been great. My only other complaint would be that I fail to understand why they have to wait till the end of a calender month to alter account choices. I had to wait 3 weeks to increase my spending with them...go figure. I realise billing is based on the month thing, but really, is it such a stretch of an idea for them in planning the way they are gonna set their system up, that someone may want a change, say, in the second week of the month?!

[MonkeyNet]

I have been using Bigpond's cable service for about 5 years now. Love the service. Had some initial issues over the first year, but network has been pretty rock solid since. Best part is because the AU Ubuntu archive is on the Uni WA site, the speed that i get for d/ling deb packages is around 200-300kb/s.

I also run a small ISP providing ADSL and wouldn't put in a connection if cable was available. The speed limitations of ADSL just aren't worth it considering the data I transfer.

Bigpond has never been great at keeping their file mirrors up to date but have improved dramatically. Got my Ubuntu, Edubuntu & Kubuntu ISO images from the files.bigpond.com mirror and was pulling a full iso down in about 5 mins

That's my 2 cents worth :)

[Adrenal]

Bigpond is overpriced and it's marketting tactics are designed to draw in and rip off the not-too-savvy.
Exetel are much better

[manicka]

I've used iinet and aapt. I wouldn't touch bigpond with a barge poll. They are way to expensive.

[jacksaff]

Telstra are evil and you should avoid them if you can. Bigpond is the reason Australia is 5 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to broadband. They sell a deliberately hobbled version so as to be able to charge more for faster connections. 256kb/s is not considered broadband in the rest of the world and the exact same equipment telstra send you is capable of far higher speed if their marketing policy allowed it. They also indulge in anti-competitive behaviour on a huge (and completely ignored by the media) scale. Unfortunately, because of the way telstra was/is being privatised they have a virtual monopoly on connections and nearly everyone else is forced to basically resell their service (at a similar price).
Seriously, I had a connection 8 times faster and half the price in Korea 4 years ago as I have with bigpond now and China too is years ahead. So, I assume, is the rest of the world.
Because of the structure of the industry telstra's service is actually competetive with everything else in Aus, but don't lose sight of the fact that the reason the whole lot suck is entirely the fault of the big T.
Sorry about the rant. I have to use telstra.

[The Mekon]

We have been on Bigpond for about 15 months after waiting years for them to upgrade their local exchange. It works OK but is expensive for a reasonable download limit.

I have a slow 256Kb/s connection but a a retired pensioner I have plenty of time but little money:). I ususally download big files overnight.

The service here in Noosa is not too bad if you are lucky enough to be connected. The are still people in my street waiting for connection.