I thought it was about time for a little rant about a subject that’s been preoccupying me for the last week. I’m a software developer and I work from home. I’m therefore dependent on a solid Internet connection to work. When I moved in to my new abode I thought that Bigpond cable would be the way to go. Big fat cables reliably moving 30 Mb/s around per second down and 1.1 up. And that is what I got, well at least for the first 9 months.

And then late March 2012 swung around and the joys began. Over the course of one week Telstra/Bigpond managed to completely erode any faith I had in them. Beginning on Thursday, 30 March performance became intermittent. Fine one minute, then gone the next. Pings revealed either inability to reach the DNS servers or their failure to respond. Packet loss of up to 80% at other times. Failure of the cable modem to connect at others.

So, on calling their abysmal 133933 ‘technical support’ line I’m told that there’s maintenance going on in my area and there may be outages. I ask when completion was anticipated. Oh, should be by next Wednesday. No outages of more than 2 hours I was told. I’ll send you a text message when its resolved I was told (I’m still waiting for that one and it’s Friday the next week). OK, I’ll be patient, I think, despite thinking, gee, wouldn’t it have been nice if they actually warned me they were going to do that in advance.

The following night… 21 solid hours of failure to connect and several more 5 hour outages over ensuing days. Even when a solid line was obtained it was so intermittent that it was practically useless. Here we are on Good Friday, the 6th of April and there is absolutely no improvement.

To complicate things, on the Wednesday (4th April) of this week the neighbour decided to get the tree removed from his front yard. However, one of the branches removed that day was being used to tension my Bigpond cable which subsequently fell down so it was hanging about shoulder high down my driveway. Consequently, I had to wait out in the street in case anyone in a truck snagged the cable as it crossed the road. Call to Bigpond ‘help’. Oh, we can get a technician there on the…. wait for it… 14th April. Yes, 10 days after the fault is reported. A fault that involves one of their cables hanging down onto the road. Not a long-term sustainable position, consequently some running repairs involving a ladder and a brick were jerry-rigged.

However, the point remains of why I had to do this at all. Do they not take responsibility for even the basic upkeep of their network? Do they not care that a customer cannot connect to or successfully utilise their network?

And there’s more. Connectivity issues have plagued the week, so I thought, better get some standby wireless connectivity to ride things out. Some foolishly naive voice inside me convinces me to get a Telstra 4G service (Telstra is the largest telecoms company in Australia and runs the aforementioned Bigpond company). Foolishly I thought that things can’t be as crap with a mobile service. I’d used Internode 3G wireless before and it was activated immediately and was rock solid. Here I am 20 hours after ‘activating’ my Telstra 4G modem and still it won’t connect. So it’s essentially useless too.

Time to walk methinks. Immediate resolution or cancellation imminent.