The internet... PART 1

(In Benders voice) Behold! The Internet!

So for a while now we have been living in our townhouse, and making do with 3 mobile Broadband and going to the parent's house to use the net. Now that we're fancy business entrepreneurs we can finally afford fast awesome internet of our own. Now I am by no means an expert in this field so I was reliant on what my own research and the "helpful" people working for the net companies could tell me.

We were looking at Optus, Internode, AAPT, iiNet, and TPG. Lots of funny names, a few funny commercials, no funny call centre operators. Broadband isn’t the fastest any more, now there is ADSL or ADSL2 or ADSL2+ and after that there is naked ADSL2+ or extreme ADSL2+ or naked extreme ADSL2+. Seriously. And for Naked things you don’t need to have a phone line which is great for us because we don’t use our home phone but then we find out we need to call up Telstra and have them turn on our phone line for us to continue not using it but it’s just a one-off payment of $59, not a monthly fee, oh but it will be 3-8 weeks once they flick the switch for us to be on the internet. But if we want it done in 3-7 days then we need to pay line rental and incur a monthly fee of $27.95. And did I mention peak and off-peak times? Oh yes, you can get on a 20GB plan but that’s split between 10GB during peak hours (12pm-2am) and 10GB off-peak (2am to 12pm) but in the off-peak they only charge you for half your usage, but doesn’t that make the plan a 30GB plan? And don’t forget to ask if they charge you for uploads as well as downloads!

I think that they do this on purpose to make people’s head explode and once they tape it all back together they end up just throwing their money at the big ol’ interweb companies and saying “here, please take my money and just give me something that will enable my computer to check my mail!” which is almost what we ended up doing. Now we are on a $59.95 a month Extreme ADSL2+ plan with 25GB of usage as well as paying a $59.00 one-off payment to Telstra for them to start charging us $27.95 a month in line rental as well as a one-off $129 fee to Internode to start charging us the $59.95 a month and also a one off payment of $199 for the modem and some other one-off fee for them to ship it up here, but hey, we will be online within 10 days and somehow, this ended up being the cheapest, easiest option for us.

Oh and guess what, now after talking to Nikki (who was on the phone signing up for the bloody thing as I was writing this) the guys at Internode (even though they checked out address twice and told us we were eligible) have informed us that we don’t have the correct exchange in our area for extreme adsl2+ and now we have to put up with stuffy old adsl. ARGH. Also even though we were told that could pay via invoice rather than direct debit because we had to buy a wireless router we now have to pay by credit card. Oh but don’t worry because we’re able to call up again and wait on hold for 39084019384 minutes to talk to the accounting team and change it later.

For the love of god people where does it end?