Poor service; Switch

When we purchased our home it also meant swapping internet technologies from Telstra Cable TV to Naked DSL, that is ADSL without a telephone line service connection. We selected major internet service provider iiNet as they were locally based and well respected.

Our service had worked well for us, and was actually faster than the Telstra internet had been, though only just. The Cable TV-based internet was always problematic and periodically required unscrewing from the wall to cycle the connection and reset things, it wasn’t the best. Having that kind of internet too made it difficult when moving as not all suburbs offered this service, so when renting options were limited.

Our Naked DSL service was great for several reasons, it was reasonably quick, by Australian standards, though as we later discovered not so by world standards; it was also great as it came with a VOIP telephone connection which allowed us to call internationally at significantly discounted rates. Then, in 2017 things went awry. All of a sudden one day our connection speed dropped from 12Mbps to 0.1Mbps, barely useable. We called iiNet in hopes of resolving, the whole process took us 6 weeks to get fixed and we weren’t reassured to learn it could reoccur; thankfully it never did.

A year later our service was upgraded to the new NBN service, significantly faster, albeit on exactly the same line. I held some apprehension given almost one year prior what we’d experienced, would we go through this once more? Thankfully on the NBN we’ve never seen our speed drop to the unusable 0.1Mbps again, however we have regularly seen our connection drop out for several minutes at a time, sometimes multiple times per day; sadly this is not limited to ourselves, it occurs across the NBN, though each household’s experience is unique.

Today, I was working form home when this afternoon our connection again dropped out. Expecting the usual several minute till service restoration I just surfed the net on my mobile phone. Once things were back I again resumed working, then again under 10 minutes later it occurred once more. Before I finished work 2 hours later it would occur a total of twelve times. In the end I actually gave up, using the hotspot connection on my iPhone to allow me to get work done as clearly iiNet just was determined to prevent me doing so.

We had discussed previously the desire to transfer to another service provider, however, after today’s abysmal service we bit the bullet and signed ourselves up with Aussie Broadband. We were determined it would not be another TPG-owned company as iiNet’s quality has deteriorated under their ownership. We only hope to be transitioned to Aussie quickly.