# Forum Home Renovation Television, Computers & Phones  What am I going to do with this?

## Bros

I got an email from Telstra yesterday and they have taken my data allowance on my landline from 100gb to 1000gb. I went to 100gb as when we are babysitting my granddaughter she would get over the 50gb but now 1000gb!

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## DavoSyd

do you like sport, music, movies or TV?

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## toooldforthis

also, they have changed a lot of their plans to unlimited.
wtf
personally I would like to see the speed unlimited and you pay for the data limit you want.

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## mudbrick

Unlimited plans are good because you don't need to keep track of how much you use.
Find some utube videos on whatever you're interested in to burn up some data... fishing, fast cars, pretty ladies mowing the lawn, whatever!

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## rebuildr86

> personally I would like to see the speed unlimited and you pay for the data limit you want.

  just think about that proposal tho. if everyone was on unlimited speed, everyone would be unstable and slow. it is most sensible to offer unlimited data and different speed packages.

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## Bros

> do you like sport, music, movies or TV?

  I rarely look at movies but I look at some of the Netflix documentaries and some catch up TV but you can spend just so much time looking at a screen. My Netflix is one o the three log on's which my daughter pays.

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## phild01

10GB is fine for me, makes me wonder what people need so much data for.

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## rebuildr86

i use over a GB a day over a 1.5 Mbps 3g data connection.
cant imagine what it would be like with a fast connection.

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## mudbrick

Last time we looked at home phone and data packages there was no price difference between
unlimitted data with one mob and other places capped plans so of course we went unlimited. I like knowing I'll never get a 
surprise bill for $$$ for using too much data, and if someone wants to stream Lawrence of Arabia every night of the year in HD It still wouldn't matter. 
Just think of it like buying a nail gun with unlimited nails vs a conventional one. Which would you prefer?

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## Bros

> 10GB is fine for me, makes me wonder what people need so much data for.

  Movies or any video viewing.

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## phild01

> Movies or any video viewing.

  I guess that's what it is that makes me wonder.

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## Bros

In the not to distant past you paid for a phone line and calls and then had internet added on, now you get internet and they throw unlimited calls in as part of the package.

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## commodorenut

> 10GB is fine for me, makes me wonder what people need so much data for.

   Last time I checked the logs on the router, we were looking at 300Gb/month - which is an average of 10Gb/day. 
It doesn't take long to add up though.
We have 3 TVs connected to Netflix (2 of them HD) plus a half-dozen phones & iPads between 5 people.  
On an average night, 2 might be on netflix for 2-3 hours of HD streaming each, 2 on youtube for a couple of hours all up, and I might send/receive 80-100Mb worth of emails with attachments and spend an hour or so either streaming TV on catchup, or youtube.  Or if I'm working, I'll stream internet radio for several hours - that can chew up a surprising amount of data over time too. 
Add in school holidays or a weekend, and I'm sure the daily data rate would double or triple in my place.

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## toooldforthis

> just think about that proposal tho. if everyone was on unlimited speed, everyone would be unstable and slow. it is most sensible to offer unlimited data and different speed packages.

  wot!$&!?
you reckon unlimited data doesn't add to congestion?? 
when I turn the tap on I want the water to come out.
then I will pay for how much water I use. 
what's the point of artificially slowing it down?

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## DavoSyd

> wot!$&!?
> you reckon unlimited data doesn't add to congestion??

  https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/b...nternet-sucks/

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## Ozcar

Over the last few years, our ISP has doubled our data quota so many times that I have lost count. It now stands at 500GB per month, of which we use about 9GB - so less than 2%. I would have moved to a lesser plan, but for the fact that we are already on the cheapest plan they offer.  
Around half  of the 9GB is down to Skype.  
Excluding out-and-out spam, that I don't get a lot of in the first place, practically every email I have sent or received in over 20 years amounts to less than 360MB in zipped form.

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## toooldforthis

> https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/b...nternet-sucks/

  yep.
am changing to them in the new year.
they limit customers, actually turn them away, if it exceeds a certain limit so as to protect existing customers speeds.
and they don't have contracts - they reckon once they have got you on board you won't leave.

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## Bros

> https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/b...nternet-sucks/

  Looking at the ADSL2 packages and they cost more then my Telstra one as for the NBN I cant compare as I am on ADSL2

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## rebuildr86

> wot!
> you reckon unlimited data doesn't add to congestion??
> ?

  no it doesnt thats right.
I like the freeway analogy, if everyone had unlimited use, that would be the same as everone on the freeway thinking they had right of way and tried to go down the fast lane at once. slow everyone down to the maximum average speed possible regardless of whats in front of them and the entire freeway would move a lot faster.

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## rebuildr86

not to mention, the nature of telcos world wide is to ignore capacity and oversubscribe beyond the networks capacity.
Written financial results are more important than peoples talked about speedtest results.

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## r3nov8or

> yep.
> am changing to them in the new year.
> they limit customers, actually turn them away, if it exceeds a certain limit so as to protect existing customers speeds.
> and they don't have contracts - they reckon once they have got you on board you won't leave.

  Take a look at conversations on Whirlpool and the like for actual performance. Not a lot different to anyone else

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## commodorenut

They want $40/month more than my current ISP for the same speed.  
And I don't have the "6pm slowdown issues" they bang on about.  No thanks.... (and my ISP's tech call gets answered by Aussies, on home soil too).

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## rebuildr86

i think that aussie broadband is kinda tacky,  elitist, and plain  disrespectful.
A couple of issues:
they advertise that they have all australian staff. That means im paying more than I have to. Australian sallaries are expensive. Also, the work and economoc benefits we give to some quite poor countries thanks to companies such as telstra has a massive impact on the lives of people on those countries. Its not so bad talking to a filipino on the phone. In fact they are more polite and proffesional than any grumpy overworked australian call centre operator. 
If they really are rejecting customers, what makes u say you are moving over to them next year? Are you just that elite that you deserve it? 
They also had the word "shlt" in that add. This is starting to remind of that movie Idiocracy.

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## Ozcar

I have read the Aussie Broadband threads over on Whirlpool. Yes, people have reported issues with them, but just look at what is said about other ISPs or RSPs. You can't please 100% of the punters 100% of the time, and ABB seem to do better than most.  
ABB elitist? That is not the impression I got. They are not refusing to sign people up because they have anything against them, or think that they went to the wrong school.  
For better or worse, I signed up with them a few weeks ago, but my service is not yet active. No, not because they rejected me, or want to vet me, but because it takes NBNco a while to get around to doing things. 
 For me the ABB plans are not expensive compared to other NBN plans. However, as mentioned further back in this thread, my usage is very low, and perhaps it is a different story for the larger plans - I did not look at those in any detail. If you are after "unlimited data" then obviously ABB is not for you, but I think you should be prepared to end up disappointed unless there is some drastic change to the NBN CVC pricing.

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## DavoSyd

> unless there is some drastic change to the NBN CVC pricing.

  https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-c...o-offer-478336

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## rebuildr86

When i say theyre elitist, I mean they are suggesting that their customers will be special because the service wont be oversubscribed. That means only a select few can have it.
It kind of reads like they think they and their customers shlt doesnt stink.

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## David.Elliott

On the consumption front the wife and I get through about 150gb per month...We don't watch free to air at all any longer, it's all Netflix, Stan, iView, or SBS On Demand. So between those and music streaming that's what we get through. 
I regularly get somewhere between 14 and 18 mbps on our ADSL2 connection. And we are 5.69 ks from our exchange. I see the lime green NBN cable down the road a bit and dread the day I'm forced onto that.   
My daughter recently connected with My Republic for her FTTP connection.  She came from a naked DSL at $40.00 p/m with good speed and the usual suspects wanted a lot more than that for less speed and data. 
With MR she's getting an average of 66 down, 30 up anytime she checks. Just looked at the My Republic website and pricing has gone up - a lot...about inline with the others now... 
As a business she found MR to be very average on the communication front, much like the others, however the pricing she got made it worth the initial dramas.  Not so now...

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## Ozcar

> ...
> I regularly get somewhere between 14 and 18 mbps on our ADSL2 connection. And we are 5.69 ks from our exchange. I see the lime green NBN cable down the road a bit and dread the day I'm forced onto that.

  Over 5km from the exchange? Can't see how you would get those speeds - we get around the same speed as you, but our line length is a tad under 2km. 
 NBN is FTTN here and we are around 530 meters from the green box, if the cable goes by the most obvious route, but perhaps it does not. This time next week I should know what speed we can get, but I opted to start out with a 25/5 plan which should be way less than it can sync at.

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## DavoSyd

> When i say theyre elitist, I mean they are suggesting that their customers will be special because the service wont be oversubscribed. That means only a select few can have it.
> It kind of reads like they think they and their customers shlt doesnt stink.

  what's hard to understand? they wont add new customers until they get more capacity...

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## DavoSyd

> Over 5km from the exchange? Can't see how you would get those speeds - we get around the same speed as you, but our line length is a tad under 2km.

  https://www.adsl2exchanges.com.au/vi...09d5962a&nbn=0

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## Bros

> Over 5km from the exchange? Can't see how you would get those speeds - we get around the same speed as you, but our line length is a tad under 2km.

   Our route length is about 2.3km as we get 9 mbps. 
One of the things I have noticed is some of the packages here are offering bundled voip phone. I played around with voip a few yrs ago and it was not the best when the evening came and you were limited due to congestion.

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## Marc

Voip sucks. They managed to charge for what is free. This is the tinned air or the bottled tap water all over again.

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## DavoSyd

> I played around with voip a few yrs ago and it was not the best when the evening came and you were limited due to congestion.

  if it is NBN voip - it should be CIR not PIR  :Wink:

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## Ozcar

> https://www.adsl2exchanges.com.au/vi...09d5962a&nbn=0

  Dunno what I'm supposed to see on that map. Are you on a top hat or something?

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## Bros

> if it is NBN voip - it should be CIR not PIR

  And how would you know what it is as they don't advertise it.

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## DavoSyd

> Dunno what I'm supposed to see on that map.

   
it supports the 5km claim, but certainly makes the 18Mbps claim questionable...   

> Are you on a top hat or something?

  (i am not the op.)

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## DavoSyd

> And how would you know what it is as they don't advertise it.

  um, you ask them?  :Dunno:  
if voice is important to you, you should also ask whether the provider has provisioned adequate TC1 CVC to handle a mass calling event....

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## Ozcar

> [/SIZE][/FONT] 
> it supports the 5km claim, but certainly makes the 18Mbps claim questionable...)

  Yes, if the location is right it could be 5+km, but the speed? Unless there is a decimal point in there that we just can't see.

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## phild01

> Voip sucks.

  Been on voip for years using 4G.  Far better voice quality than the landline though it can break up on occasion only for one region number down south, all other calls are fine.

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## Marc

Mm ... that is not the reason why I think it sucks  :Smilie:

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## rebuildr86

yep. Skype is free, and is effectively VOIP? is it not?
it is crazy.

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## rebuildr86

> what's hard to understand? they wont add new customers until they get more capacity...

  thanks davo, i should probably not bash the idea before i know the ins and outs.
how often do you think they would pruchase more bandwidth? How often does something like that happen? hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, 10 yearly?

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## DavoSyd

> thanks davo, i should probably not bash the idea before i know the ins and outs.
> how often do you think they would pruchase more bandwidth? How often does something like that happen? hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, 10 yearly?

  well, there's two main types of bandwidth that an ISP needs to provide end-user services: 
similar to bearers and joists... 
the bearer is the big link that carries traffic from the ISP's connection to the NBN to it main operations - and the rest of the internet (aka "backhaul" - you sign 2 year deals for these links, and need lead-time to modify) 
and  
the joists, that carry the smaller more geographic diverse traffic from each of the 121 points of interconnection (POIs) back to the big bearers... (this is called "CVC" or Connectivity Virtual Circuit, and is NBN only traffic - the backhaul on the other hand is used for all the ISPs data, including ADSL, etc) 
the bearer is the big pipe, that the ISP buys of Telstra, Optus or TPG... these are like 1Gbps+ pipes... so you don't want to be changing these too often, plus they are harder to upgrade... 
the CVC is what NBN sells to the ISP, these can be updated in almost real time, and the ISP can adapt to changes in use at a particular POI pretty rapidly... (if it so desires! or not...) these are minimum 100Mbps pipes, but go up to 10Gbps if you have thousands of customers at one POI...

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## DavoSyd

> yep. Skype is free, and is effectively VOIP? is it not?
> it is crazy.

  no - skype is voice over the internet, (using a type of voip as the technology) 
there are other voice services  that are proper *voice over internet protocol* - that use dedicated bits of pipe, not the rif-raf pipe that the internet exists on...

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## r3nov8or

Oh dear

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## rebuildr86

but its free, (skype to skype) and it uses an internet connection hahaha. for that reason i just cant see why id want a voip phone when i switch to NBN. so is facebook calling, and that uses next to no data and more ppl have facebook than a working phone these days.
i guess customers wouldnt be to keen on talking to us about renovation tasks over facebook tho haha.

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## phild01

Skype free isn't very useful as a home 'phone.

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## DavoSyd

> but its free, (skype to skype) and it uses an internet connection hahaha. for that reason i just cant see why id want a voip phone when i switch to NBN. so is facebook calling, and that uses next to no data and more ppl have facebook than a working phone these days.
> i guess customers wouldnt be to keen on talking to us about renovation tasks over facebook tho haha.

  some of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people in Australia rely on a voice connectivity... so just because you can't see why you would want a NBN VoIP service, doesn't mean everyone won't...

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## rebuildr86

sorry did i come across as disrespectful or something? when were we talking about elderly or vulnerable people??

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## David.Elliott

We sponsored an international event last year in Texas held by the worlds largest provider of multi tenanted Hosted Phone platforms. 
 Microsoft are planning to cut out the Telcos in the voice world by using either their own data connections or buying bandwidth from others.
This is why Skype for Business is included with Office 365. Several of our large customers are seriously looking at a move to S4B.   No more call charges..and video is native to the platform..

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## DavoSyd

> sorry did i come across as disrespectful or something? when were we talking about elderly or vulnerable people??

  nah, not disrespectful, you seemed to be implying "who needs VoIP anyways?" ... nearly all people need a form of communications, but some dont have the ability to use Skype etc, (for lots of reasons)... mobile phones have come a long way, but coverage is not ubiquitous...

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## Marc

Good move to cut the telcos out. They have milked bad service for premium prices for way too long. It's the turn of software companies to give us bad service.  
As far as NBN Voip, in case you haven't noticed, if there is a power failure you internet goes and so does your phone. When we got NBN through Optus (the yes people) they provided a modem for internet and phone but removed the battery we had from them with the previous system. Power failure? your bad luck.
When we moved to TPG, the first thing they did was install a battery to back up the phone.  
A land line does not depend from power. Voip SUCKS, because it is unreliable, because you have to pay for it when it should be free and because the very existence of VOIP allows Telstra from abandoning the copper network that was built and paid for with billions from taxpayer, they got it for free and are now throwing it out. 
Next door to our holiday house a tree has fallen on top of the Telstra lines over a year ago, taking down one of the poles with it. The lines are still functioning but they are in a tangled mess on the ground. We reported this to Telstra, I took one of the Telstra workers personally to see the disaster when he came to fix something for us and the cables are still on the ground under the rotting tree branches and will remain there for years to come.

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## Bros

> A land line does not depend from power.

  Like it or not if you live in an urban area you will need power for the NBN telephone as the landline will be history.

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## Marc

I do not like it  :Smilie:

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## Bros

> I do not like it

  Neither do I

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## r3nov8or

> Like it or not if you live in an urban area you will need power for the NBN telephone as the landline will be history.

  Pretty sure you can add battery backup for voice, for a price

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## Bros

> Pretty sure you can add battery backup for voice, for a price

  Origionally they were saying that the initial install included a battery for free and subsequent batteries you had to pay for. It would end up like all batteries you never bother replacing them until they fail.

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## r3nov8or

> ... It would end up like all batteries you never bother replacing them until they fail.

   If it's important to the owner (or their nearest and dearest), they will care for it. e.g. smoke detectors. Sometimes you simply have to look after yourself.  
It's a funny concept, when one believes the phone company should provide a phone line during a power outage, but the same person also accepts that the power outage itself is inevitable and he/she simply deals with every other inconvenience it presents...

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## Bros

> It's a funny concept, when one believes the phone company should provide a phone line during a power outage,.

  Im not saying that but I just like the simple life which would cover a lot of the population.

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## commodorenut

> Origionally they were saying that the initial install included a battery for free and subsequent batteries you had to pay for. It would end up like all batteries you never bother replacing them until they fail.

   My NBN (FTTP) came with the battery backup supply.  It was one of the early installs though.  There's a power button on it you can press to start using the battery if you need to make a call in a blackout. 
However, some 2-3 years later, they installed the NBN at my IP, and there's no backup battery.  When the tenant asked the installers what was going on, they said they don't do the batteries now unless there is a specific need for it, and they get the request via the official channels.

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