So the story continues, I churned my ISP from TPG to iiNet. All went well and I was back online nice and quick, given I had already the hardware and the necessary smarts to do so. Part of the plan was removing my dependence on Telstra and getting an old-style telephone line, sure I still needed the copper to my house, but no longer needed to pay $30 each month for it to exist.

To get around this I was getting BoB, the Broadband-in-a-Box solution that included a modem, router and voip/telephone all in one that replaced my old and expensive equipment. They delivered it, all as promised and I took it home, wired it up and turned it on.

Sure I had to do all the various setting up stuff, which a disc was provided for, but I like and am well used to doing this the old way, like using the easy-to-use administration stuff instead of a disc program that asks me the same questions anyway and fills in the blanks for me, really, either way its going to be the same thing.

The box is nice, shiny black and comes with a phone. The phone even came with it’s own extra charger base so I can leave that downstairs in the kitchen while the BoB can sit upstairs in the office where it needs to be anyway.

There’s not much more to say, it works, runs fast, seems to even improve the speed very slightly above the other decent boxes I had.

Voice Over Internet Protocol (voip) is the complex way of saying that your phone calls are now like skype. The sound is converted into data (like a cell phone) and over the ADSL is sent to their servers, these servers then relay to another server or call our to a landline. Serious, if you didn’t ask, you would not know this is what is happening, it all sounded nice and clear and proper, like I was really talking to somebody (like I was).

The simple conclusion is that everything works, iiNet was good at providing me my new service.

Done and dusted.