Bigpond Wireless Broadband - It's what you use when you have to.

First off, Bigpond: You give me the shits.
I don't have a problem with their services at all. I love the fact that they appear to like open source software and provide unmetered downloads that are based on user requests. I mean hell, I can request a full linux distro dvd download and a day later I get a nice email stating that it is available for download in the unmetered File Download section. They also allow TWIT netcasts, all of the Revision3 IPTV releases basically anything that falls under the Creative Commons or open source category.

Recently Bigpond even decided to add a Ubuntu repository into the unmetered category as well (no multiverse repository but I can live without that), in fact that is one of the main reasons I have moved from other distro's to Ubuntu. Bigpond Office is also worth a mention here also.... although I have never used it. I'm guessing it's a little like the online Google office services with word processing, spreadsheet and presentaition applications and a whopping 250MB storage. I'm not taking the piss here 250MB should be enough for most casual users to store their online generated material.

I also don't really mind waiting a couple of hours for their customer service phone representatives to take me off of hold and actually address my internet connection problems. I usually have it sorted out by the time they get to me anyway, it must the hold music that kicks my brain into gear. When I do finally get to talk to someone there is always something else I want to ask about them anyway so it's never a wasted call.

My biggest gripe with Bigpond is their Wireless Broadband service. Until recently we were paying around $160 for a 550kbps to a "supposed" 1.5Mbps connection with a 3GB data cap with excess usage charged at $0.15 per MB. The speed has since been bumped up to 550kbps - 3.0Mbps and the price dropped to $114 with a 3GB data cap with excess usage RAISED to $0.30 per MB. WTF??

!STOP THE FREAKING BUS!

Hmm.... let's think about this for a second. They increase the speed, increase the excess usage charge, drop the price and leave the data cap the same?? I couldn't give a crap how much faster the connection is if we can still only get the same amount of content. Sure the monthly price drop was nice but why the hell wouldn't they increase the data cap? Why the hell did they double the excess usage charge?? An why the hell is the highest data cap plan at 3 gig?? Why all of this when they have inevitably halved the time we can reach our data cap and then double the penalty for exceeding it? I can only think of one reason.... $$$.

As the internet is growing up, the data requirement to browse different sites is increasing. Flash videos for example are everywhere and some sites still insist on making their whole site to run off of flash. I don't have a problem with flash I think it's a great delivery medium for static audio and video streaming. Web 2.0 has brought a lot of cool technologies to how we view the net and the integration of mixed media draws a lot of bandwidth. For a perfect example bigpond should look at their own site, it's big, bloated and uses a fair amount of bandwidth to render itself into a browser. Thankfully the bigpond site is unmetered for bigpond users or it would be easy enough to blow the data cap by just trying to go through the site to look at my mail through the webmail client.

And so to Bigpond I say this:
At the very least jst give us 5 gig for the same price and keep your lousy $0.30 per MB excess usage going and I'll be happy.... Oh and you can even drop our maximum speed back to 550kbps - 1.5Mbps.
Thanks.

Oh and as a side note to the last Bigpond customer service representative I spoke to:
No, I do not believe you are Australian or in Australia even though you swore black and blue that you were. Melbourne is NOT the capital city of New South Wales and New South Wales is nowhere near my hometown you friggin' douchebag! And no, I do not live closer than 7 k's from a telephone exchange.... I think I would know as I happen to live here. Do some research before you get all frothy at the mouth and listen to someone who knows where they live instead of using your fingers trying to count. Christ, I'll even send you a goddamn map if you like....

*EDIT*
Okay, so my research was flawed. I was Informed that the excess data charge has not gone up to $0.30, it remains at $0.15 per MB. For some reason (thankfully) our plan has kept the excess data charge locked in at the original rate.
Oh, I decided to tone this post down a bit.... I'm not so annoyed now I've had a chance to vent.

A lazy man's promise.

Hmm... I haven't been here in a while. A lot has happened since I lasted posted something here and I've been too lazy to express my opinion on it and basically I forgot about it. For those of you that know me, you know that I usually don't have a terrible lot to say.... well unless I've had a couple of beers. I guess it's not that I don't have much to say it's just that I probably think too much. Lately though there has been a lot of interesting things happening in the world and especially on the net. And since most of my time these days is spent staring at a blinking cursor of scrounging the net for news, I could probably afford to put a bit more effort into this blog. One day soon I'll move my rants from my home server over to here but I think it best to remove some of the profanity and bring a little order to them first. So that is a lazy man's promise.... I'll do something soon :)
Until then, I found this Techdirt article about a possible merger between Yahoo! and AOL highly amusing (If not only for the feces comparison):
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080211/015628216.shtml

Oh I came across this as well, it's probably as old as the internet itself but I found it funny.

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