The South Melbourne telephone exchange is lucky enough to have DSL2/2+ ports available, so when I signed up for my internet connection I was able to get a DSL2/2+ deal. In Germany I had DSL 3000 through 1und1.de flat rate (*). DSL2/2+ on the other hand is up to 24000 with a flat rate - yep 24mbs, awesome.
In combination with a DSL2/2+ connection, iinet offer a free SIP phone service so you can make calls via the internet with a VoIP DSL modem (or a software phone).
It hasn't all been plain sailing though, I decided not to go with the default DSL modems sold by iinet (Belkin) but get a Billion DSL modem instead. After finding some issues with the unit and getting it replaced, it turned out that their firmware didn't work when I was accessing it (web based) using a Mac, neither with Safari nor Firefox.
When I used a work Windows machine with IE, no problems (See a screenshot of the error).
Australia also has a different concept to flat rate bandwidth than Europe, I presume due to the distance the traffic has to travel, and/or other reasons. Essentially, you get a fixed amount of high bandwidth traffic for peak and off-peak times (eg. 20gig peak, 20 gig off peak) and when you exceed these limits, your bandwidth rate is shaped down to a lower amount (eg. 64kb) for the rest of the month. It's still within the flat rate terms/conditions so there's nothing extra to pay, but it's obviously not as fast as 24mb DSL2/2+. It's an interesting and better approach to bandwidth limiting rather than having fixed limits or charging extra. Something that's cool though, is that your upload traffic doesn't count (yep - I can hear all of the Euro BT users screaming in joy from here) :)
Looking forward to some high speed internet access in the future!
*) They tried to get me to leave after seeing I was using their flat rate too much - apparently this hasn't been the first time either.
Posted by crafterm at April 11, 2006 03:36 AM | TrackBack