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.

Down here in Australia, we are subject to awful prices on our telecommunications technology like mobile (cell) phones and broadband. If it weren’t for Comcast introducing their 250GB cap in October last year, I doubt many Americans would know the meaning of a broadband cap.

Telstra is the largest telco in Australia, and owns the majority of copper phone line in the country. Many Australians assume Telstra is the only choice as a broadband provider, as they own the phone lines and run lots of pretty TV ads. Thus, Telstra has been able to exploit their brand image by charging their customers obscene amounts for their internet access – customers who either don’t know about the competitors supplying ADSL, or are locked into 2 year contracts with Telstra.

Here is an example of one of Telstra’s price tiers for ADSL2+ (20Mbps theoretical maximum): $69.95 / per month, which is roughly 45 USD. Seems expensive, but that’s not all. This plan has a download cap/limit of 600 megabytes! So what happens if you go over this limit? Telstra charges you an extra 15 cents per megabyte, which equates to $150 per gigabyte! (96 USD as of 24/02/09).

My grandparents related a cautionary tale to me about how their neighbour’s nephew stayed over for the weekend and racked up a monthly Telstra broadband bill in the thousands. I told them not to worry, I know a thing or two about the internet.

broadbandchoice.com.au is an excellent impartial website which gives comparisons and returns results based on search criteria for broadband plans in Australia. You’d have to be crazy to pick Telstra for your internet access after visiting that site.

My plan, while not the best now, was the best I could get in my area for ADSL2+ some time last year. It gives me 15GB/month plus 30GB/month in the times between 2am and 12 midday. When going over either of those limits, my internet speed is slowed to a slightly-better-than-dialup speed of 64Kbps – or rather, it is supposed to be.

I replaced the modem that my internet provider sent in the mail (Linksys AM300) with a Speedtouch 536, connected to a Linksys WRT54G which handles the PPPoE authentication and provides wireless and NAT functions. It seems that this combination has somehow thwarted my ISP’s attempts at slowing down my internet access speed, as I have exceeded my limit the last 2 months but did not get slowed down.

My theory is that the modem needs to reconnect to the ISP for the slower connection to be established, but maybe since I am not using the stock modem, my ISP cannot remotely reset the modem and force a reconnection. So I guess I have unlimited downloads now? (as long as there’s no blackouts) Pwn’d.