‘ju:femaiz

As all good geeks who move into a new abode I’m currently going through the fun of organising my web connectivity. Now while I understand that processes take time, I find it amusing how many of the options out there in Australia involve contracts of between twelve and twenty-four months. Twelve is fair enough, as this is a fairly standard lease agreement and fits in, however twenty-four is probably pushing the possibilities there - not to mention the possibility for being stuck with a less-than-adequate connection contract as technology shifts over those two years.

For renters, the no-contract options are what is necessary and I’ve found them rather limited. While in Newcastle I entered a non-contract agreement with AAPT, and while the connection reminded me of my time using dial up in the late 90’s, it was adequate for my needs of gmail, google calendar, flickr, twitter, theroot42, google reader, linkedin, facebook, wikipedia, recipe sites, ruby on rails reference sites, amazon and a host of other sites I regularly visited. It wasn’t without its problems though, as I found my uploads of images to flickr, I’m With The Band and FasterLouder/InTheMix regularly timed out much to my annoyance. Not having a contract meant that after four and a half months of connectivity, I could break it without a cancellation fee.

It took me until the end of my second week in my new place to organise with AAPT to once again have the intarwebs installed. I seriously thought it would only take around a week or two at max, however I’ve since been informed by the kind help line people at AAPT that the process for connection is as follows:

• Request Telstra for a connection at the exchange for your place
• Wait for Telstra to connect your phone at the exchange
• Have AAPT check that Telstra has indeed installed the phone line at the exchange (this part will generally have taken seven working days)
• Have AAPT connect the intarwebs (ADSL2+ in this instance)
• Wait for AAPT to confirm that the intarwebs have indeed been connected (another ten to fifteen working days)
• Ensure that AAPT have actually sent you the modem that you have paid for so that you can check that the intarwebs has been installed
• Finally connect to the intarwebs some month after you’ve made the reqest

So, for a twelve month plan, you’d better prepare yourself for an additional month due to the ineptitude of our current telecommunications providers (be they infrastructure or service providers) before you’ll actually have intarwebs at your place.

It’s no wonder that despite the slightly higher price and lower speed (and download size), services such as Unwired are gaining popularity amongst the rental crowd. If telcos are serious about what amounts to a large amount of customers (and only bound to grow with interest rates and house prices the way they are) they really need to do two things - provide a faster turnaround time and good value non-contract bound service offers.

P.S. I’ll update this when I finally have my connection sorted…but I won’t be holding my breath that it’ll be up and running before a fortnight’s time.