Bye bye landlines

[Kyle Communications]

Well I had no connections at all today. Contractors putting in a new Ecosafe treatment plant for the mother inlaws granny flat we are getting installed here. Well of course all 3 phone lines I have here were right in the middle of where they were digging with the excavator.....ripped up conduit and broken cables....had to do some refitting to get myself back online again

 

 

[Guest Andys@coffs]

Well I'm on NBN Fibre and its the ducks guts!!!! (for the week that its been turned on!) my provider wont provide 100/40 until they get enough customers in the area so I'm suffering under 50/20.....4.5 to 4.8MBps download is great and leaves previous ADSL2+ for dead at 1.2MBps download (and to put that in context...that's close to an old 3.5" floppy per second........) VoIP is Ok, but to be Ok your provider needs to have it sh!t all sorted and your router needs to be good and know to prioritise VoIP traffic over all other traffic. Most consumer routers cant do that or if they can require those setting it up to be reasonably IT cluey.

 

For mobiles I have an iPhone with a mobile broadband $180 per year 12 Gb for the year service. You can bring your mobile number with you and if someone rings my number the phone works as it should....I use Skype for outgoing calls about $3.50ish per month for 300 minutes of yack time...... So I get 300minutes of talk, 1Gb of data for $18.50 per month.......but no voicemail (oh...shame that :<) ) and no SMS to non apple clients....but that's an apple thing not a restriction on the service......you can SMS and call using normal capabilities but the cost for those is 25cents per SMS and OMG how much? for phone calls and that then eats into your $180 credit so less broadband.....Of course 000 for emergency works just fine if needed.

 

 

[Gnarly Gnu]

This is with iiNet & when you have an issue you get an Australian. They are based in WA (part of Westnet) & support is excellent.

Oh yeah, wait till something goes wrong. My iinet connected business line (in the city) was out for five days just a week ago. No phone & ADSL drifting intermittently off and on. They were real casual about it, offered no alternative and seemed peeved when I followed them up three or four times. Seriously would they would be not too fussed if their own phone lines were out for five days? Now to try and claim some sort of compensation, not optimistic....

 

 

[coljones]

Well, I don't know about anybody else, but despite woeful coverage, first order of today was to check the weather and plan around it.Then today I was able to use this science fiction and quickly take advantage of the troubles in the Ukraine and sell the last $15K of wheat I had left to sell for a bit more money. Yep...believe it or not, the Ukraine is a big wheat exporter and a major competitor to Aussie wheat...hence a big spike in wheat prices over the past couple days. Prices were checked, decisions made, contracts signed and wheat sold...quickly, and all on line.

 

Then got a call from my livestock agent and I happened to be feeding the cattle he wanted to talk about. So I was standing next to the cattle and was able to tell him about them.

 

Of course today on my smart phone I was also checking the availability of a tractor tyre that got a steel spike though it yesterday (I'm not making this up )

 

We have crap Internet and mobile coverage, and we will be the last in Australia to get decent coverage (if ever) but despite that it is a vital part of today's farming business. It's also good for checking METARs, TAFs and NOTAMs

Yes, bloody OPTUS - always over promising and under delivering - ratbags

 

 

[Keith Page]

Hi rgmwa

 

I like it, because it is all so true.

 

At least it will work in the digglies (fringe areas) and it will not gobble up battery as if there is no tomorrow.

 

My biggest problem is finding a phone which will work in the fringe ares, the phone shops all have the best phones, till ask what is range the phone has -- not supposed to ask that.

 

Most people live and work in a city, what about the bush.

 

Regards

 

Keith Page.

 

 

[rgmwa]

Yes Keith, I have to charge it about every three weeks now as the battery is getting on a bit. I lost it once (left it in the club aircraft) so thought I'd try one of those new-fangled flat screen thingies. I didn't like it much. It was a pre-paid like my old one, but chewed up money at an unbelievable rate until somebody worked out that it was downloading stuff from the Internet all the time (no idea what it was). That cost me a fortune. Then I had to charge it just about every day to keep it alive, and when I did use it to talk to someone, the speaker was so faint I thought my flying career might be in jeopardy. It needed a password every time I switched it on or didn't look at it for five minutes or so. Don't know why, seeing it was my phone, but I suppose it was some kind of regular memory test to see if I wasn't too senile to use the damn thing. Let's not even mention that crappy excuse for a keyboard you had to use to type something. I'm used to real buttons, not pressing on a patch of glass that is clearly disconnected from the number or letter beneath it. I could never get it to work properly. I also got sick of swiping and sliding all the time to find which strange looking icon might do what I wanted to do. Luckily, a few months later, my old phone turned up in the lost and found box at the club. I was happy again and found that my hearing had mysteriously fixed itself too.

 

rgmwa

 

 

[astroman]

About to get talked into getting rid of our landline with internet plus ??This day and age we all have our trusty smart phones, and iPads are common place.

My iPad has a prepaid card $180 yr.......giving me next to unlimited data, throw in Skype and all is great. iPhone x 2 with $600 plus call allowance per month costs me $100 mth.

The $180 recharge will get you 12GB as pointed out above.. $15 bucks a month for 1GB is a bargain for low users, but for most people it is a tiny alllowance. Telstra are doing $20/month off home ADSL bundles if you are connecting a new broadband service so they are actually competitive for the rest of the month!

 

 

[DonRamsay]

My experience with Westnet/iiNet has been absolutely brilliant. Think Telstra and then think 180 degrees opposite. You don't sit in a queue, you ring they say they're busy and they (an Aussie) rings you back. They stay on the phone as long as it takes to fix the problem. Then they ring you back ina couple of days to make sure all is still good. My wife and I have mobiles (SIMs) with them. $20 per month each and unlimited calls within the Westnet universe and ample + calls to everybody else. Use the mobiles for pretty well everything (not data) and never get extra charges.

 

We rarely use the landline and have been meaning to get rid of it and go "naked DSL". We get ADSL2+ and, being 400 meters from the exchange (800 metres along the wires) we get good speeds.

 

Telstra is still the maintainers of the copper so they can be as slack as usual if you get a line problem.

 

I use an iPad with a Telstra SIM ($180 p.a.) for best range. Amazed to find that when I didn't use all the data last year they carried over the leftover bit into the next year! My laptop never leaves my desk. I don't use my smartphone for internet - rather use the iPad. I have my Samsung TV plugged into my modem and operate the laptop WiFi. Internet TV (iView etc. )works as well as broadcast with no buffering once a program commences.