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Telstra’s still able to passionfinger things decades later...

In order to get ADSL here, I need to have a Telstra-based land-line, because all of the other ISPs have to work through GiganTor’s DSLAMs. Having Verizon start a retail business in Aus would teach T all about monopolies, as they have 40 million customers in the USA alone...

It seems that GiganTor ain’t letting them use ADSL2 mode on the same DSLAM, either, as the previous owners of this house had BigPong ADSL2, but crew like TPG will only quote on ADSL1 speeds.

When I hit my mother-out-law’s house in December 2007, T had trapped a Zambian student staying there with a $17/month ADSL plan... 256/64kb with a massive 200MB a month quota. When he’d blown the quota (pretty much inevitable) & been billed for the excess & complained, he was told (words to the effect of) “if you had a real plan, you wouldn’t be billed for the excess so readily” so they upsold him to a $75 512/128 plan with a handful of gigabytes a month in quota. I switched that to a basic AmNet ADSL2 plan with 10GB quota (plus another 20GB through WAIX) for $29, which wound up at 6/1Mb. Since pretty much all of the $17 plans yielded a blown quota, in my perspective, that’s fraud.

The basic ADSL1 plan here costs more than the default ADSL2 plan, & has a 25GB quota versus a 130GB quota (which a friend in south-west Armadale blew in 4 days!). The ADSL2 clamps at 2Mb on overflow, no idea what the ADSL1 clamps at. Unlike BigPong, a static IP address is included.

The source of this whinge was a BingPong Mobile Internet stick (ZPE) which plugs in, is seen on the USB buss... & manifests as Flash storage only. When I hand-modprobe (or set up udev to do the modprobe) usbserial, I get /dev/ttyUSB0... but no communication. It could have been a Huawei stick, such as the Virgin (carrier is Optus) stick working fluently (out-of-the-box) in this laptop now, but BigPong chose otherwise. D’uh!

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