Waiting for iiNet
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to relocate my ADSL as I’ve moved house. The process has been less than inspiring. It started with a quick check on Whirlpool to see if it would make sense to switch to a better provider. As it turns out, there are a few other good plans out there that beat iiNet. But I want to use ADSL2 and get a VOIP provider put on. It turns out that most good deals on ADSL2 in my area require phone bundling which usually includes a line rental of about $10 more than what Telstra can give me. iiNet also bundles phone with an expensive line rental (though they have more recently come out with a price to match telstra) but they can do a pretty good deal if you bundle VOIP with them.
So I decided that to minimise confusion and be able to keep my email addresses etc, I would stay with iiNet.
Getting through to iiNet on the phone requires a fair bit of patience. You ring through to the voice menu thing. If you press ‘2’ for existing customer, you are put into phone limbo where the on hold music eventually dies out and you are left with silence for a minute or two before being disconnected. Working on the theory that they would prioritise new customers, I chose option ‘1’ the next time. This can also involve very long waits and on one of the days I tried, I just got an error message read out to me and then disconnected. When you eventually get through to someone they are usually pretty helpful.
The frustration of relocating is that it takes over a week for them to do whatever they do with Telstra who actually makes the connection as the broadband wholesaler (I’m guessing it involves pieces of paper, in trays, internal snail mail and RFC1149 (carrier pigeon internet protocol)). But you can’t get the ball rolling in advance as you need to have an active phone connection at the new house that is in your name. Which you obviously can’t get until the previous dudes move out. I thought that maybe as an existing customer, it might happen faster … I was wrong. It has been ten days today and no iiNet ADSL.
The other thing I’ve done is to only do a relocation at this stage, apparently it was way too complicated for them to handle an upgrade of my plan to ADSL2 and VOIP at the same time so I’m going to have to go through all of that when the connection is eventually made.
Now I realise that this story is probably one of the happier ones you can read about ISPs in Australia. I just thought I’d record this so that people can look back and marvel at how hard it was in 2007.
[tags]adsl, adsl2, broadband, iinet, telstra[/tags]
