Hi All,
I've had it with my current ISP (Optus-Cable).
The area I am in has suffered from ongoing "maintenance and upgrade" works for the better part of a year now. At least once a week and sometimes for weeks at a time, the internet will perform so poorly that loading a website takes as long as making a sandwich (after going to Woollies to pick up the bread). We also get frequent dropouts lasting from 10 minutes to a couple of hours. My contact with the technical support area has only provided me with an acknowledgement of the problem, that it's been ongoing for the better part of a year and they have no ETA on when it will be completed. Apparently the issue is at least partly around upgrading the local exchange (not sure how that can take a year but that's what I've been told). I've also had a couple of techs come out to the house, check the cable connection, replace the modem (I now have 2 additional modems sitting in the house…) and head off with not finding any issues.
With this in mind, I can get Telstra-Cable in my area as well. Given what little I've been given from Optus in terms of why we are being impacted, can I expect a similar experience with Telstra, or is there the potential to circumvent the issues Optus is having (infrastructure or Optus issue)? Are there any questions I should ask Telstra that may help determine if I would experience the same issues?
Thanks!
Can you say what general area you're in? What exchange? That might be the best way to figure out what you can expect because each area has it's own bandwidth and other conditions. Hopefully someone from that area can confirm how Telstra cable is going.
I'd say in general that Telstra cable will be better than Optus cable just because it seems to be better managed. I had Telstra cable at my home for a few years without issue but I noticed it slowing after the release of AU Netflix and then earlier this year it was running like garbage during peak periods - i.e. 6 - 12pm week nights. I'm paying for the 100Mb/s speed package and during those times I'd be lucky to get 2 or 3Mb/s from a Telstra speed test site. They were clearly in need of an upgrade.
This went on for perhaps 2 or 3 months and I received a notice in the mail that they'd be performing upgrades in the next few weeks and to expect a small outage on some given day. That date came, the outage happened while they did their thing and from there it's back up to full speed again. It's not good that the slow down issue occurred because they should have seen it coming, but all credit to them for fixing it. I had suspected that they'd do nothing in the hope of dumping the network and all of it's problems onto NBN.
In comparison my parents were on Optus cable in the same area and had all the same problems - except a few years earlier. It went on for months and for a while Optus would deny it when called but eventually it all hit the press because it was that widespread. I think in their case it wasn't just capacity issues in particular areas but failing central infrastructure as well. In the end my parents dropped it and got an ADSL connection (with Telstra) which technically was slower than the Optus cable theoretical speeds, but overall it's been a better connection - faster and more reliable.
Bandwidth problems can be very expensive to fix for telcos - they might need to run new fibre to locations or buy bigger allowances on shared connections. It can also be bigger issues with the local nodes and upstream infrastructure becoming oversubscribed. Either way, Optus does not seem to have a culture of doing the right thing and fixing these issues. For that reason alone I'd avoid them and get something else.
You're doing the right thing to check the state of Telstra cable in your area before jumping. If you get good indications, or no indications of problems at least, then I'd recommend changing over to Telstra cable. Alternatively you could look into ADSL and you might get a good experience there… but you're in the land of phone line quality, distance from the exchange, choice of exchange providers etc etc etc. It's not clear cut. I'd only go ADSL if Telstra cable was known to be absolutely woeful as well.
Do give Whirlpool a search for your area / exchange name. People are quite vocal there when there's issues. Just note that issues with ADSL do not automatically translate to Cable. Take any reports with the appropriate amount of salt.