So I moved to Sydney to study Computer Science and Technology at the University of Sydney.

I stayed with my generous uncle for about a month while I found a job and a place to stay.

I have now been living in a share accommodation house with 3 other great people. But my current dilemma is NO INTERNET! That’s why I am writing this post from the university 24-hour access computer lab – while I am meant to be working on my programming assignment, or my group website, or my engineering speech.

I have no interest in using the landline at home to make calls, and neither does any of my flatmates. But in order to sign up for Naked (without dial tone, and subsequently, no Telstra line rental) ADSL2+, I need to have a current active Telstra phone line.

This is one indication of the stranglehold Telstra currently has Australia’s telecommunciations industry in: Say, for example if you don’t use your phone line in your house and you have it disconnected – you need to have it reconnected, and pay a minimum of 1 month’s access and at least a basic Home Phone line plan to Telstra before you can sign up for Naked ADSL with another company. This is due to Telstra’s ownership of telephone exchanges and the way other companies identify local loops in the database with phone numbers.

If you look at Naked ADSL prices at ISP pricing tables, the normal “dial tone” version of this teir is usually $5-$10 cheaper. This is because the cost of your phone line rental to Telstra hasn’t entirely vanished – the ISP supplying you with Naked DSL still must pay for this Unconditional Local Loop: currently $16.75/month, which they pass onto the monthly Naked ADSL charge. Still, this is better value than having to pay for a dial tone to Telstra, plus a normal ADSL plan.

But Telstra has been trying to increase its ULL charge to $30 a month. Luckily, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission rejected this application, as it was deemed uncompetitive. Of course that’s anti competitive! Telstra will do anything it can to hold onto it’s precious copper network, even if than means deliberately driving out competing ISPs by increasing charges like this.

I can’t wait until the whole country is blanketed in tasty optical fibre that’s equally available to all businesses, as proposed by the Federal Government’s National Broadband Network. But by then I will have probably moved to California anyway, so I can only dream.

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.