The time is approaching for me to get cutover to NBN HFC and I'm seriously thinking of dumping my current ISP (iiNet) because their technical support is now next to useless since it was acquired by TPG.

Currently my landline and mobile phone services are with Telstra. Unless Telstra can offer me a much better deal than I have now, I'm happy to port my landline (to become a VOIP service) and mobile to another provider.

So, who is using whom and why? Who would you avoid like the plague and why?

(Needless to say I am not interested in doing business with TPG or any of its tentacles.)

I can understand your frustration with Telstra, overpriced & overseas. All about profit. & TPG must be bad to outdo Telstra for customer disservice. They must be slipping as they set the standard for bad. They need a lot of heads at the top to be rolled.

One only has to look at the Bushfires, see where communications all went pear shaped.

Unfortunately I am in the boat where Telstra is the only pathetic mobile signal I can get and since the inception of it. 4G phone struggles to get 3G its a black spot & they have told me that they have no intention of fixing it. Optus are building infrastructure where Telstra isn't.

NBN is not an option with them at the moment as they were dumping it here, as it was only around 3% of their business, & 66% of their complaints.

As you might recall from my NBN thread of a few years back, it took about 2 years from the announcement of NBN being here to when it was actually available for use.

I've used Telstra since the start, their technical is good, it's reliable, and they sometimes offer refunds without being asked. The actual switchover from ADSL to NBN was pretty much painless, and has worked as advertised.

Telstra's customer service is another matter entirely. It's fine if you visit a Telstra shop, but if you try calling, or doing it online it's completely hopeless. Just pray nothing goes wrong is all I can say.

This won't help much but most ISPs aren't worth their salt. I started out with prepaid Microplex, which was bought out a few years later by Optus. Since then I've used Bigpond, Optus, Spin, TPG, Swiftel, People Telecom, FreeNet and a few others. None have been that great at the end of the day which is why they always cajol people into signing two year agreements - it's the only way they can get people to stay with them and put up with all the "not our fault, blame the wholesaler" BS, not to mention talking to non-English speaking idiots in foreign countries when you are having problems.

Since moving this website back to a commercial webhost (and that can come with certain dangers too) I've just been using my mobile phone to access the Internet. To be honest, whilst that is more expensive and the data limits are a bit more restrictive, it's been worth it from an anti-ageing perspective because the service has been more reliable. The only downside is that I am using Belong, which is Telstra's budget brand and as such it uses Telstra's network. This network generally performs well but Telstra likes to tell porkies about how widespread it is. There are places in the bush where Optus is showing good 4G coverage and 'no service' for Telstra. I go camping several times a year and it is a pain to need to carry a second phone with Optus just so I can log in here and make sure things are okay. I also need to be contactable at work so I need to divert my normal phone, which has two SIM cards, the second being a work number, also on Telstra.

Now, for the bad news, regarding choice. TPG overtook Optus as Australia's second largest phone company a few years ago. The brands they own include TPG, Westnet, Netspace, Internode, iiNet and Chariot. I think they also now own VHA, which is Vodafone and Hutchison Telecom. So if you sign up with any of those, you'll be putting notes in David Teoh's pockets and talking to the same HELLdesk twits when there is a need to solve a problem.

I've had quite a few ISP's over the years but found Telstra to be the best of a bad lot.
When NBN fiber to the curb finally arrived here I signed up with Telstra as I couldn't bear the pain of changing my email address again.
The Modem and the NBN connection device arrived with instructions on how to set them up.
Unbelievably it all worked first time with even the home phone (which my wife wanted to keep) working straight away.
The modem comes with a 4G sim which supposedly takes over if the NBN FTC goes down.
My speed using Speed test.com is reliably around 47Meg which is far better than the 3Meg ADSL2 we had before.
So far so good (better not talk too soon though).

I can confirm that the 4G does work. I've had one long outage and a few minute-sized ones, and the mobile coverage kicked in correctly. There's a bit of delay before it switches over though, and as you'd expect it isn't very fast - but it does work.

Although they tell you to mount the Telstra modem as high as you can, for the best mobile speeds, many people seem to overlook that part then complain when it doesn't work.

Although they tell you to mount the Telstra modem as high as you can, for the best mobile speeds, many people seem to overlook that part then complain when it doesn't work.

Not only this but many dwellings aren't line of sight to a mobile tower or they live in an area, such as I do, where signals are drowned by TV broadcasting. Sydney seems to be a standout in the latter regard and probably because Sydney was first to commence television broadcasting. It was decided by Channels 9 and 7 and a short time later Channel 2, that their transmission towers would be located slap-bang in the middle of a built-up area instead of on top of a big mountain like most other places.

Because of the radiation from the towers and probably also because interference with the signals would be an issue for broadcasters, skyscrapers cannot be built next door or even in the same or neighbouring blocks. The towers should have been built at Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains, allowing a much larger broadcasting footprint but again, it was 1956 and the original towers weren't as tall as what is there now.

The eastern half of Sydney is quite mountainous and such devices would have trouble working in some of these areas if Telstra is recommending they be placed as high as possible.

My NBN is actually Wireless & I have mentioned before that it was set up & overseen by a bunch of trained Monkeys, who had zero knowledge of propagation of Radio waves. Not only that, as it was not going on a house (which seemed to be the limitation of capability) It ended up being my tools doing the work.

Pliers, hammer, a blunt hole saw for wood, maybe screwdrivers, and an adjustable wrench and a couple of ladders are not a toolkit. Positioning it where it was going to be directly in line with the boles of three centurion gum trees over a metre in diameter was also not going to work. That was because the antenna had to be on a roof on their "approved" mount.

And you wonder why we have issues. Took months for the neighbour to get his sorted as they had to get Mumbai to think for them. Had they not put the tower in such a stupid place things may have been a lot better.

Thanks for the input to date, folks. Keep it coming.

Re Telstra: I'm dirty on Telstra at the moment because they doubled my monthly mobile charge telling me that I now have unlimited GB. Here's the problem with that: I don't have an internet account with Telstra and I don't own a smart phone -- ergo I don't use even 1 byte. I raised an online complaint about that and they keep sending me SMS messages saying that the ticket is still open but replies are slow because of Covid-19. What an excuse!

I did have a Bigpond account for 6 months when Bigpond was first launched but I dropped it because of continuing problems with emails. They were supposed to be able to handle my existing non-Telstra email address but it never worked.

Back when Bigpond morphed out of the Microsoft Network I think they were using Lotus Domino for their mail servers. I don't think Microsoft Exchange was that widespread at the time.

Telstra has always had a habit of assuming what vendors tell them is true and they've been bitten hard by a few of them in the past, including with their billing system.

I once used Bigpond for webhosting. What an overpriced rort that was and they didn't allow users to delegate their domain names themselves. Bigpond used to keep their DNS server addresses secret from new customers and charge $165 for the job of doing it on the user's behalf. Even back in the days when domain names cost an arm and two legs, the domain licence was cheaper than Telstra's delegation charge!

And, because it was Bigpond webhosting rather than the commercial-grade Telstra webhosting, there were no real features included aside from the webspace. Even extra subdomains were out of the question.

GTC - similar situation with my mobile phone. They jacked up the price by $10/month without asking, and said I had lots of GB. But I'm using an ancient Nokia and although internet sort of connects, it doesn't support any HTTPS sites, so useless. Plus of course the text is so small that I need a microscope to read it. Complete waste.

But, for whatever reason, they started putting a $5 refund on my bill each month. They work in mysterious ways.

All the phones I've had in the last 15-odd years have been Windows powered. I am not one for apps so the lack of support for them doesn't bother me. But even with a six inch screen, I can barely read websites even with my glasses on and that includes this site. The main advantage for me for sticking with Windows is that the phone works much the same way as my laptop and with the docking station it can even become a PC in its own right with Microsoft's Continuum. I've never used the feature though so I can't tell anyone whether it is any good or not but I'd assume it'd allow e-mail, basic Office functions and web browsing. The docking station has ethernet, 2 x USB and displayport sockets. One day I may try it and see if the video driver is strong enough to power a 40 inch telly.

Some things Microsoft "acquired". The spreadsheets seem to have come from IBM "Lotus" and as it went to Excel it gradually began to not talk to Lotus. C+, C++ smell of Borland. WordPerfect was in Borland C+ I often sent it doc with a Word virus that caused the Virus no end of problems. Borland was too complex for some hackers to work on.

As there are Docs etc around I do keep a computer with older programs on it.

I friend of mine who has a nice Californian Bungalow style of house was having NBN Fiber to the house installed.
The monkeys wanted to mount the box right in the middle of the base of the bay window at the front of the house!
He wanted them to mount it on the side of the house in an elevated position, out of the way, about 6 or 8 feet above ground.
They explained that they couldn't do this because they didn't have licences to work at heights!!
He offered to mount the unit and they could simply connect it but that was too hard for them also.
Eventually a compromise was found and the unit was mounted on the side wall at ground level.
Still ugly but not in plain view from the front.
All they want to do is mount the unit in the easiest way for them and bore a hole through the wall and mount the inside equipment right where the hole appears inside the house.
In a way I was glad to have fibre to the curb as I could control where the inside equipment was placed.

I am using Telstra for everything. We are lucky and have fibre to the house.
In my opinion Telstra has the best mobile coverage. Used to be with Optus found their mobile coverage useless.