850kb/s might be your max, but plenty of other people see more than a 1000. But I agree, Australian net sucks the wang.

The base infrastructure in Australia is, frankly, a joke compared to the internet standards of most industrialised nations and its reflected in the basic prices Australians are requried to pay for highspeed - which is still quite slow, frankly - internet.  This hurts Australian businesses and of course the internet surfing crowd, and also gamers.  The principle reason we don't see localalised servers for services such as Battle.net is because of the pathetically high bandwidth costs that ISPs such as Telstra love to charge.

The Government's optic fibre network will go a long way towards helping, however like most things down under, expect it to cost us significantly more than you'd pay - even taking exchange rates into consideration - in the United Kingdom or the United States to access those lovely highspeed lines.  Companies like Tesltra are profiterring off of the lack of additional options; we have download limits, when other entire nations don't, because all the ISPs in Australia do it and they do it because we don't have any other option.

netspace cannot get adsl 2 where i live.

Thing is, if Telstra and Optus had their way, it would be... a helluva lot more.  Both charge premium prices for a lot less than other providers offer for much less.  For example; I was getting 25gb at 1500kbs with Bigpond for 79.95 per month, while I'm getting 120gb at 8-10 mbs with iinet for S89.90 a month... 5 times the data at 15 times the speed, and no upload charges.  With Bigpond my 25gb download quota was whittled away by upload deductions... not so with iinet, I get the full 120gb p/m regardless of how much is uploaded.

Oh, and another thing, Telstra is already complaining that it will have to charge twice the government's recommended retail price for DSL2 on the new network, while iinet, AAPT and other providers are saying they would be able to provide it for cheaper than they can now.  I'm so glad Telstra did not get the contract to roll out the new network, otherwise we'd be paying through the nose for it, regardless of ISP.

And another thing that severely pisses me off about Telstra... they keep ringing and/or sending me letters trying to woo me back as a customer.  I keep telling them NO, in no uncertain terms, but they persist and keep offering better and better deals, none of which come remotely close to the package I have currently.  When I mention this I'm told that Telstra does not compete on price, but instead offers superior products and services.  Yeah, right!  I left because they are inferior... and up to 40 mins of recorded voice prompts/sales pitches when ringing to make a simple account inquiry.   Never again!!!

i used to get those phone calls from telstra too until one day they rang me up and I thought Id do a little lying, they asked what ip i was with i said iinet,they said how much for a month i said 40 gigs a month for 60bcks (i was lying of course) then I said, can you do better than that?

er....no i cant the telstra guy quietly replied and hung up, never rang back again......muahahhah..

i love my iinet too. xxx

But the whole continent is upside down on the planet, so I would image you should all be thankful that it works at all.  

Caption for cartoon...

That's not a knife.....THAT's a spoon.

well i'm happy with my speed, would be better if it had a larger cap though for its faster speed.

I have a little niece named Matilda, and may we have a lot days waltzing ahead.

Looks like I will have to put up with that slow internet Doc.