For two years I have been waiting on my (and other) service providers to get ADSL2+ into my local, suburban, near city exchange. It’s not going to happen, for some reason this is a little box on a reasonable block of land that can’t accommodate new equipment. Of course the behemoth of Telstra has done it, and they have a few resellers, but my provider, TPG which has provided good service, has not even listed my Maidstone exchange for an upgrade any more, no plans, no mention and no light at the end of the tunnel.
Like most ADSL plans, this rides on a standard line rental with Telstra, so I get a home phone line (mostly unused) for $30/month and a network with TPG for about $50/month and for the most part I have been happy.
I reviewed this recently and have found that iiNet provide ADSL2+ at my exchange and as part of a ‘naked’ plan for $70/month I will get higher speed and more data (I go from 10g to 30g) and also I keep my existing phone number and they provide a VOIP plan which gives me free calls locally and STD within Australia.
I just ordered the service yesterday, it will take up to three full weeks to all happen and I will write again on my future experiences, but for now.. what differences will I get, what do I loose and what did I have to investigate fully to make the decision for me a good one?
What do I get?
The obvious plusses are going to be more data at faster rates. ADSL2+ is better than the older ADSL so as I download stuff and use game machines for online play this will be of benefit. I will save between $10-$20 per month when I include my minimal phone usage. Calling family locally and in the country is going to be free and now we can be more likely to call friends interstate for as long as we want.
What do I loose?
Technically, I will no longer have a static IP number. TPG gave this to me as part of the plan and iiNet don’t (unless I pay extra for a business service) and this means if I want to talk to my home computers from work or elsewhere this may be a little more difficult. I will solve this by using a dynamic domain service where my modem/router will update a service like DynDNS and ensure that home.domain.abc will always point to my home’s IP number.
The VOIP (voice over IP) telephone service I hope will be good, some people are having issues with this and quality reliability levels ad also if the power is out, unlike a normal phone, the network will also be out and my home phone will be out. Thanks to mobile phones this should not be a problem, and realistically, my powered cordless phone doesn’t work when the power is out anyway. Also, from VOIP you can not call emergency services numbers like 000, again something I will rely on my mobile service for.
What’s different?
I bought a nice new ADSL(2+) router a few months ago, thought this would be fairly future proof and all in all has worked well. It would work for iiNet too but it doesn’t provide the hardware/functionality needed for VOIP so I started looking at the options.
An ADA (Analog to Digital Audio) device can allow you to connect normal phones to the data network of your modem/router, they start at about $100 and would do the job. This means that I would have the modem and this ADA box running to make the system work in my house and all be non-supported equipment that I would have to configure, it would probably work and all but take some toying to get right. The basic modem/router/voip box I could get would be about $170 but would not provide the wifi I use, so I would still need to use a wifi box for that also, again two boxes running.
iiNet however have a ‘Bob’ box, which is their high-end all-in-one solution that includes a Modem, Router, Wifi and VOIP phone with handset. For $270 I get one of these and it should do everything I need. It also should use and connect to my other old phone handsets directly, so my current 2 cordless handset phones should work with this single bas station.
What’s the experience?
So far so good. I made a call to iiNet to ask them about the hardware they had as options (as the web site was not too detailed on that score, not at least until I got the the ordering part) and also to check about keeping my phone number and allowing inbound calls (often an issue with VOIP like with skype, you can call out for a fee but need to pay more again for an inbound service). I waited for about 1 minute to get through to sales, and when I did they were really helpful and answered my questions without any issues of comprehension, mis-understandings or need to ask me for a credit card number. I asked, they answered and they said thanks.
The online order form took a few steps to get through, understandable and all (mostly) but it worked great. My biggest problem was addressing the courier delivery of the equipment to my work address, their system was a little limited on the amount of detail I could put in here and my work location needs this detail for stuff to get to me.
Within a couple of hours I got an email confirming the order. I replied to this asking if I needed to do any cancelling of my old services and they replied by the next morning to tell me that they would handle everything.
So for now everything is great. I expect over the next few weeks to loose my phone and network connection and eventually get a new one, along with a cool new black box to play with.
Stay tuned for updates and info on my future experiences.
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