Broadband: Which plan is for you?

Telstra's response was that they were simply too busy to participate as this extract from their e-mail shows: "Telstra Business and Government have declined your invitation and the BigPond production team has been flat out and indicated it's not able to assist at this time."

Optus states that it does not have DSL available in the area of the Test Labs, and were clearly not willing to use Telstra's.

Telstra is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to broadband networks in Australia, however it does have a critical mass when it comes to end-users with BigPond, as well as a healthy stranglehold on wholesale broadband technologies. Several other providers such as Internode, Veridas, and iPrimus are building their own networks -- in fact iPrimus recently rolled out its 100th DSLAM with 200 promised by the year's end.

We also invited iiNet which actually submitted a plan for this review and went through the testing rigors. The results it returned were terrible, and after urging iiNet to check its setup -- as Steve Turvey discusses in his commentary -- it discovered a bit of a problem with the modem setup and duplex settings, severely curbing its performance. iiNet did fix the problem and in the limited time remaining it performed well. Unfortunately, with invalid test results we were unable to include them in the review.

Plans
You can find plans in Melbourne and Sydney that start from just AU$13.95 a month, and an ADSL modem can be bought for less than AU$100 -- only slightly more expensive than dial up (ignoring the one-off connection costs). Thankfully these days, once you are connected to an ADSL service provider there is the option to "churn" to another (unless locked into a contract period/plan) for about AU$30.

Admittedly the low-cost plans are tepid with speeds of 256/64Kb/s and download limits of around the 200MB mark. Bear in mind that this is still a good deal faster than a dial-up connection with the added benefit that it's on all the time, network permitting of course. It does not prevent you from making and receiving regular telephone phone calls, however it isn't suitable for business purposes.

Step up to a AU$20-per-month plan and the speed warms up to a brisk 512/128Kb/s, while AU$25 a month will just lift you to a balmy 1500/256Kb/s. Not long ago, unless you had cable, that was about as fast as you could go. But not anymore -- ADSL2 and ADSL2+ are available in selected metro areas and speeds of 8192/1024Kb/s and 12288/1024Kb/s are also up for grabs, and from around AU$30 to AU$40 a month they are good value.