UPDATE: Bigpond is now not letting me login to my account, their website is either f**ked or they don’t like me, lol..
Bigpond/Telstra have been my ISP for the last 6 months, let me give you an quick idea of shizen housen they have been.
January - 7th(roughly) June - Our internet disconnects when somebody calls our home phone rings.
June 8th(roughly) to June 13th - They FINALLY get somebody out to the exchange and they fix the problem, proof that it was not a fault at our end, oh did I mention, if it WAS a fault at our end, we’d have to pay to get it fixed - EVEN THOUGH Tel$tra are the ones who INSTALLED THE DAMN THING!
June 14th - infinity - Bigpond screwed up again, our internet disconnects when the phone rings, BUT WAIT! There’s MORE! Not only does it disconnect our intertubes (what I call internet) but when we answer the phone, half the time there is no sound.
Ok, calm down… take 10 deep breaths.
Alright, so that was the first problem. Onto number 2…
When we saw their deal on broadbandguide, the prices were as follows:
12gb - $89.95
25gb - $99.95
50gb - $109.95
This is also what the person at Telstra said to us, exact same deals, well, one month after signing up, whadda you know, they changed their deals WITHOUT notifying us, which as the company who owns pretty much all the phone lines in Australia, you think they could afford a simple computer to phone call all their customers and let them know, geesh, even I could probably do that, then again, they are probably maxed out on computers as you hardly get to speak to a human when you call them up.
Ok, they changed the 50gb plan, but was it really that bad you ask? YES! it’s no longer 50gb and $109.95, it is now an absolutely amazing $149.95 for 55gb (or was it 65gb?)
C’mon Telstra, we are paying premium price here, as you are the most expensive in Australia, and don’t deny it, it is actually illegal for you to offer cheaper prices than the competition as you rent out your lines to them (except for a few ISPs.)
Ok, number 3, customer service.. ohh, how you gotta love talking to computers for 30 frickin’ minutes and then accidentally hit the hang up button (my fualt) and then go through the same process again… gggrrrraahhhh..
Ok, that was my fault, but we are always talking to outsourced customer support, mainly Indian.
Let me tell you 3 parts of calls that we made that REALLY pissed me off.
#1, the customer support male (or should I say female?) kept calling me mam, I told him every time that I was a sir, I repeated it about 5 times in a row and he wouldn’t get it through his head, I told him probably more than 10 times in the call that I was not a mam and was a sir, he never called me a sir (or master.)
Now, if somebody can’t figure out what gender you are on the phone and I know that Chris can be a female or a male name, but, if you say plenty of times that you are not a mam… if they can’t get that through their head, how the F**K are they going to figure out what the hell is wrong with your internet connection.
#2, Now, I was having problems with the internet, out of the blue, it started to disconnect and connect for 2 or 3 seconds and then disconnect again every minute for well over 2 hours, we reset the modem, we did this and did that, so we called them up. Whadda you know, got another Indian (now, I’m not having a go at Indians, but I want to speak to somebody that understands my accent and I can understand them clearly so that there aren’t any mistakes in conversation. Plus, you are paying top dollar for outsourced customer support.)
Okay, so we were on the phone to this guy, he said, hmm.. maybe it’s your modem, try using the one we sent out for free. So I plugged it all up and it wasn’t working. He said to try something in the command line, I got results saying the modem was connected. He was trying to figure out what to do, there was silence for a while and then I asked, maybe I should try the installation CD (this was 10 mins into the call) and he said no, don’t try it, it’s obvious that it is connecting to the computer - the computer can see it.
Anyway, to cut an hour long conversation short, I tried the installation CD after, well, as I said, an hour long phone call of which we have to pay for as it’s a 13 hundred number. I tried the CD, and it works, and it even fixed the old modem.
IIIIDDDDDIIIIIOOOOOTTTTTTSSSSSS!
#3, I was complaining on the phone about them charging for the uploads I make, the guy (also Indian) said that all ISPs in Australia charge for your uploads… I started to list ISPs who don’t and he said, well, that’s pretty hard to believe, you would need to call them up, that’s impossible… I responded saying, I don’t need to call them up, it says on their websites that they don’t charge for uploads. He refused to believe me.
TODAY BIGPOND HAVE REACHED A NEW LOW!
Alrighty, I was doing a live stream last night, wasn’t expecting to stay on for long, but I had a reasonable amount of viewers. I was planning to do it again today after I uploaded the “Thank You” video, which seems pretty near impossible now as Tel$hit have charged us for internet that they weren’t originally charging us for… what you don’t believe me? Well, I have VIDEO proof of it from last night’s stream, but I don’t have the bandwidth to go their right now and grab the links, so I have attached three screen shots.
Now, keep in mind:
1) They started charging us for the internet on the 21st over an hour before it was even the end of the 20th (they charged us ahead of time)
2) About 1GB of usage from the 20th was suddenly moved over to the next days bandwidth, the 21st.
3) At 12:06, according to bigpond, I had used 6gb on the 21st, that’s 1gb a minute, in other words, my data rate should be, according to the bill, 1,048,576 kbp/s – yet on every other day, I get at TOPS 800kbp/s.
4) Streaming live uses well under 100mb for a hour of streaming, max is 150mb from that as I started at 10:30pm roughly.
Telstra, your billing sucks, your site sucks, your support sucks, your internet service sucks, your bandwidth limit sucks, your cancellation fee (which by the way, we were told there wasn’t one) sucks, your line connection sucks, your outrages fees suck, your phone line sucks..
Telstra, you plain suck, now you are going to have to do a sh*tload of work to change my mind, maybe a free cancellation fee would be best, that way I can at least give you half a star out of 10.
Ok, here are the screen shots, I have plenty more evidence later. Good thing our bandwidth usage is reset on the 24th! Phew…
9:49PM 20th June -
4:00AM 21st June
3:00PM 21st June
PLEASE NOTE: Look at the first image, there are 3 highlighted circles, compare what is contained in those circles with the other two images, their website is totally screwed, one day its syas my account usage is 10,664mb the next day, 0mb and then 11 hours later, still 0mb, so WHY ARE WE THROTTLED IF WE HAVE USED 0mb ACCORDING TO THEIR WEBSITE?!?!
Check out www.notebooks.com and sign up on the forums - I’ll see you there 
