Any attempts to speak with support to follow the lead that other ISP’s had already provided was like yelling down a well. One fellow I spoke with suggested I send an email with all the ping and traceroute examples. Sure enough I did.

Below is the result of that email. Notice the date it was sent, and the date in which I got a reply.

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This is now the joke that is Bigpond Tech Support Email.

My wife had a plan of attack which involved going to work earlier then usual, so that she could go join the queue at Apple Store Sydney. All was going well until she woke up a little earlier then she needed, and the queue was reported to be about 25 or so people. So she made the decision to go another hour earlier then planned.

I woke to find her in the process of getting ready and offered to drive her into the city, rather then catch a train at 4am. So I got up and changed, then headed in. The traffic was great, as we had none. Of course you’d expect that for 4am in the morning. Dropped her off out the front just before 5am. She joined the queue estimated she was about 26th or so. Felt really happy about leaving earlier and getting a reasonable spot.

By the time I got home at about 5:40am, she was telling me the queue had doubled. Didn’t surprise me. She also mentioned camera crews came down sometime later and the queue just kept getting bigger.

Eventually store opened at 8am, and she managed to get in and directed as required. Unfortunately she didn’t come out with her iPhone 3G 8GB until about 11am. If people didn’t hear, the Optus backend systems had some serious performance issues, not to mention network connectivity. So it took basically from 9am to 11am just to process her application etc.

Even with the wait, she was still excited. She was totally happy to finally have gotten an iPhone 3G. Plan seemed to have work. Now she has her iPod and phone in one device. Exactly what she has been waiting on.

I must say, I do like it too. Never had a chance to play with one before in detail and now I have. It is as good as the keynote from Steve Jobs last month.

Won’t post any pictures, as we all know what it looks like. It’s currently sitting in an iPhone dock on her desk. She bought one of those too, along with a nice leather cover and some screen protectors.

And the funniest thing to happen today would be the sms she got while setting up her contacts from a number in which we hadn’t associated with a contact yet. It read “How is your iPhone?”. She replied and said “Who is that? and how do you know I have an iPhone.” Turns out the person who sent it is a friend of course and they saw her on the Channel Nine news standing in the Apple Store line for iPhones. Channel Nine did a quick story on the iPhone and showed the start of the queue out in front of the store from the morning. And they seen her. Hahaha.

This device is going change how a lot of us work and communicate.

I’ll consider the purchase of one in the near future.

By the time that 30min call ended, they had found a port and set the service to provisioning.

Wednesday evening it had DSL sync and working.

Unfortunately it came at a cost. That cost was the fact the foolish person who provisioned it, managed to screw our voice service. Yes, you guessed it. We now have no dial tone on our phone service. So I can’t make calls or even accept them.

Logged a fault today, they said it will be fixed by Tuesday. Of course I got the usual spill about troubleshooting, so I repeated myself a few times to indicate it was fine until your incompetent tech attempted to enable DSL. Before that, never had a issue. After that, no dial tone. Unbelievable.

In any case the ADSL1 1500 line speed seems fine. It’s stable and as fast as it should be for this service. Attainable line rate appears to be not crash hot, but it’s fine for the service I have. So that’s good enough for me. Just a real shame they had to kill our phone service in the process. Wish I checked it 2 days ago. We don’t usual use the land line during the week..

In other news though, 2 days after my wife’s call the Telstra Wholesale report came out and indicated that several days earlier the RIM had 40 available ports. Be interesting to see how many of those are still available in the new report due out on Monday I believe.

Our 3rd application attempt as

In the meantime decided the best alternative is probably to pickup an Unwired modem and use Unwired. It’s not entirely ideal, as I can’t work from home. But I can atleast use the internet for various things as required. Further more it will allow us to get our guide data to our devices on the network that require it.

I’ve since obtained a modem from a friend 2nd hand, just need to enable it and pay up for a plan etc. The only thing I need to do is save up to buy a router to run it, although in the meantime I might pull out an old machine and run Linux to do the job (until I can budget the cost of the router in).

While they wired the alarm stuff, I set about wiring in the number of cat5e cable runs I did from the various rooms. I wanted to make sure every area that had a tv in the future would have a dual cable run of cat5e. I managed to get this done. They all terminate back into the room we have made as our home office.

I then ran 2 more cables from the first phone point into the Kitchen and then into the home office. These will allow us to loop the phone line from the lead in to other parts of the house. In

Had considered dial up, but ideally didn’t want to use it if we didn’t have too. In the end we enabled Three’s X-Series plan on my wife’s Three mobile. Just as well we get a 3service signal from the rental. Which means the traffic is part of the plan usage. Otherwise it’s $1.65mb if it’s not.

Tested it out for the first time lastnight using her MacBook to dial out the phone using Bluetooth. Worked great and probably as fast as a 256/64 ADSL connection. So not bad. It’s only for about 2-3 months.

EDIT: We signed up for the Platinum service, in case anyone was interested. Wanted to make sure we had enough included data per month. Of course she doesn’t have an X-Series capable phone for the other services, but to enable it you either put her sim into a capable phone to activate it or use one of the many documented ways to get around it (all you need is Firefox with user-agent switcher) and a bluetooth enabled on the phone so you can dial out with it to the Three intranet.

So yeah our internet connectivity has been a pita. I spent about 3 months dealing with Netspace and Telstra to resolve the fault. In that time it never got resolved and I wasted 3 months dealing with it. Sure enough Telstra would claim it’s in the house end. They did check it on a site visit, but the tech who did so never updated his work order to reflect it was okay. From that point on they insisted I have a 3rd site visit to check something we had already had checked. So I fought it, and tried too. In the end I requested to get out of contract and well Netspace screwed me around. In the end they made me last out my last remaining 2 months of the port contract.

As of August 8th, I’ll finally be able to drop the service. Finally be rid of the issue. Although very disappointed by Netspace. It’s the 2nd time I’ve had issues dealing with them when I have a line fault. Lesson 2 learnt. I’ll never ever use this ISP ever again. Even if they have the best price. It’s just not worth it.

If you’d like to read a little more about the ordeal be sure to check out the following thread here on whirlpool forums.