Big Pond (Telstra)
www.bigpond.com
As Australia's original and largest telecommunications provider, it is no surprise that Telstra offers quite a range of Internet connection options through its Big Pond brand.
As well as standard dial-up connections, there are options for both Cable and ISDN connections via Big Pond (though these were not tested).
The setup was simple: the Join Big Pond option on the Web page leads you easily through the steps of: selecting a new or existing account; signing the membership agreement; filling out contact details, credit card number, plan selection, access numbers, software source, certificate registration, username and password; and finally creating your account.
Telstra has an excellent selection of POPs in all states as well as a Rural Connect plan that allows you to dial in from anywhere in Australia (for a price).
A broad range of plans are available from very casual three hours per month for AU$7.65, up to 150 hours per month for AU$37.50 (only available in some areas). Telstra does note, "Premium Plan customers may be disconnected after one hour of idle time. Members can set their preferred idle timeout period by visiting "Idle Timeout Settings". This can be a great feature if you forget that you have left your machine dialled in.
Web hosting is free and is available via the Personal Home Page or Personal Web Site option. From the Big Pond home page: "Personal Home Page" allows you to select a theme from a number of available templates, then add your own information and links to create your own Personal Home Page. The Personal Web Site service gives you the ability to build your own Personal Web Site of up to 10MB in size and 100MB served per month, using the HTML editor of your choice and an FTP client you can build your Web site on your PC and upload to Big Pond Home for instant publication on the Web.
Up to five e-mail addresses are provided to each account holder via the Family Mail Service, where there is one parent account and four subsidiary accounts. The parent account can access the subsidiary accounts but not the other way around, so a responsible person can supervise the other members of the family. There is a Kidz.net service that enables children to get the best out of the Internet while at the same time protecting them from the undesirable aspects of the Web.
For the gamers, Wireplay supports over 100 of the top PC games including, Quake III Arena, Half-Life Counter Strike, Soldier Of Fortune, Age of Empires II and Starsiege Tribes.
In the performance tests, Bigpond was, as would be expected, right up there at the top. Across the time windows, there was an even stepping down from 10am through to 9pm as more and more people log in. There also seems to be very little difference between using Bigpond from Melbourne or Sydney. Although Telstra seems to have huge bandwidth available out of Australia, it must be remembered that much of this is onsold to other ISPs and some may also be used for other services at other times. Bigpond lists its number of users at 650,000 but information on modem ratio and cache is considered confidential.
The Help Desk is open from 8am to midnight, 7 days a week. All up, Telstra provides an excellent service.
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4%
Do not use Dodo ADSL- They have really bad customer service. And technical support.
On their unlimited plan. You start downloading until it get to 1G and then the service starts to have ‘problems’ and you can’t connect no more.
When you call technical support, they give you a phone number to call only to find that a machine answers and ask you to leave your phone number. And then no one call back.
When you call customer service, you speak to a person, they redirects you to a blank line and then you hear a dial tone. Which means the line hung up.
I spoke to a customer sales representative called Steve to pay the bill using credit card. When I asked him to select a plan for the next month, instead of having to call back, his reply was : “ You have to call back next month to select.” And then he hung up on me. This is the kind of service Dodo provides.
I have never spoke to any customer service person who hangs up on the customer.
And then later I find that my service was suspended. Even though I had just spoke to Steve 5 minutes earlier to pay for that month using my credit card.
I am on a 3 months contract with DoDo. I still have 2 months left to go. After this kind of customer service I get I will not be using them after the 3 months period.
Note: If you disconnect before 3 months they charge you a disconnection fee $100.
Don’t sign any long term contracts with any ADSL Provider unless you are sure that you trust the service.