Just some personal notes on my recent approach to find an ISP that provides ADSL broadband in Australia. I am moving house in the next month or two, and I plan to change the ISP that provides my home Internet access, as well as the bandwidth for hosting this site. It is always good to review your ISP every now and then, as you can usually find something more suitable.
Early this week, Telstra BigPond increased the value of their broadband service by increasing the traffic quota (download+upload) from 3Gb to 10Gb, and that includes their ADSL and cable offerings. While their residential ADSL products are still over-priced, it makes their cable product quite a good value, considering a fully loaded cable in a quite neighbourhood can be 3-4 times faster than the fastest residential ADSL download stream.
Apparently Telstra Wholesale, the Telstra that provides the exchange where every other ADSL providers have to connect to, also lowered their price. Suddenly we see a lot of price drops across different providers. That makes my hunt for ADSL provider for my new house a little bit complicated.
First of all, Internode, my current provider, doubled the download quota for their business plan customers. That makes my current connection a nice 4Gb per month on bridged mode static IP address, at expensive AUD$100 per month. Too bad that I usually only use 1Gb of download every month, and that increased download quota would not be much useful to me when I’ll probably be busy fixing up my new house for the next few months. With cashflow in mind, I’ve determined to leave Internode and change to a cheaper ADSL provider. I think I’ll miss my bridged connection (and struggle with PPPoE).
Due to my low download and static IP requirement, I sorted of narrowed my choices to 3 different providers. DART, Swiftel, and WestNet, whom all have their plans reviewed last week or so. Here’s my feature matrix with the plan I am interested in.
| DART | Swiftel | WestNet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | Premium 10000 | 6:512/4gb | Premium 512/128 2GB |
| Speed | 512/128kbps | 512/128kbps | 512/128kbps |
| Quota | 10 GB | 4 GB | 2 GB (+1GB off-peak) |
| Excess | Shaped | $5/GB | $10/GB or Shaped |
| Contract | 6 months | 3 months | 1 month |
| Free Content |
PipeNetwork Subscribers national wide |
Subscribers same state |
PipeNetwork Subscribers national wide |
| Cost | $64.00/mo | $55.00/mo | $59.95/mo |
All 3 plans save me at least $35 from my current Internode plan each month (towards my mortgage, of course). Swiftel has nice cheap price, and I heard the network is quite good as well, but it lacks free contents from PIPE, which I might use a lot to download all that Linux ISO’s.
I still have around a week to decide. When it is connected, I then have to shutdown this site (been running for 354 days straight now), carry the box to the new place, and then start serving again.
have you looked at Exetel 512 6gb
$50 month first 6 months on contract I am a first timer and looking for the cheapest and fastest will be downloading lot music
doug,
I just dont feel like joining an ISP that offers unlimited off-peak download – look at what it has done to iiNet one year and half year ago. I dont download much from the net, but I do want to have consistent speed 24/7 as my site is hosted on it…
Thanks for clarification. I was looking for some advice and your info has really helped.
Keep it up..
Regards, Chandra
I have been looking for a while now and have failed miserably, all im looking for is a 512/128kbps speed, 10 GB download limit in the Brisbane north side for around $50 per month.
Please help!
If any one can find a plan to my specification it would not only be appreciated, but greatly rewarded too. E-mail me cammag5@hotmail.com Many thanks in advanced, cam
Cam,
Try Broadband Choice.
I have only used dial up and was wondering what they mean like 500Mb down load limit. Is it eack page you look at or is it like size of music files or programs downloaded???
I am coming back to Australia next year and am wondering (moderator) in Oz do you pay for download and upload time, as apposed to just paying for a gateway to the net at one fixed price. Slightly confused
Appreciate a little info
Mo
@Mo — sorry this article is way too out of date.
In Australia we do not pay for “time” but for the data transfer amount, i.e. an ADSL plan might come with 32GB for uploading and downloading per month, and if you have exceed the quota you’ll be throttled to a slower speed, or be charged for overage.