A look over at Whirlpool (an Australian broadband website) surprised me with a story about my Internet Service Provider, Soul. Apparently they are in a bit of financial trouble.
When I first linked up to broadband, I had used the daughter site of Whirlpool, www.broadbandchoice.com.au to decide with which ISP to go with. It offers a very useful search for providers, which can be filtered based on factors like speed, availability and contract obligations.
I found my first ISP on broadbandchoice.com.au, Powerband. The prices they offered seemed too good to be true, compared with other plans ISPs had to offer. Powerband allowed me something like 20GB on-peak and 40GB off-peak for $60 a month. Unfortunately, a few months later this company developed cash-flow problems and was subsequently aquired by Koala Telecom.
Apart from the few days of downtime in which technical processes transferred Powerband’s customers to Koala, I didn’t really care because Koala stated Powerband customers could stay on the same plan for the same price, even though their own plans were much worse. But within about another month, news stories on Whirlpool indicated Koala was changing their plans for the worse to avoid their own financial problems.
Fortunately, I was allowed to leave Koala without incurring a contract-breaking fee. I looked into ADSL2+, which offered theoretical speeds of up to 24MB/s. Although in my exchange area, the only candidate available was Soul.
I have been content with my new ISP for about 4 months now, but once again there in ominous news surfacing on Whirlpool’s front page that Soul is unable to pay redundancy to extra employees from their merger with TPG, and may soon be facing legal action from resellers.
On one hand, I’m annoyed at the disruptions to my service that will enevitably follow this predicament, but if I can get out of my contract without a fee like I did with Koala, I think I would like to switch to a different provider. Since I’ve looked, there are ISPs offerring much larger data quotas, especially with ADSL2+ services.
I laugh at the thought of an American taking a visit to this site. From what I’ve seen, over there they don’t even know what a data cap/limit is. They should also take a look at this Wikipedia article and stop complaining about petrol prices, too.