TELSTRA AUSTRALIA
Bigpond Broadband (Canble) installation in my flat.

A Pig At the Broadband Trough - That's me. The more speed I have on my net connection, the more I find to download. I have been known to pull 50 gig plus a month and so I'm willing to pay a bit for broadband. Living in a flat means I really only have a single supplier of Cable Broadband. In Australia cable broadband has been consistently more reliable, with better speed and less outages than ADSL. Even though I have begged Optus on numerous occasions to change their policiies, they don't install cable in flats - which leaves me with Telstra as the only broadband cable supplier for my flat. To date I have been happy with my service, although I have experienced a few outages.

A Two Year Contract - Having finally bought myself a flat I couldn't see why I wouldn't want broadband for the long term, and seeing as Optus currently won't install in flats - they tell me optical fibre can't easily be provisioned for multiple customers at one address (flats) - I wasn't likely to change to Optus any time soon. So I signed up for two years worth of broadband and I think I got myself a free installation.

Unexpected Move - My girlfriend had moved to Canberra and I didn't hold out much hope of getting the kind of work I was looking for. It turns out I had a single interview with Family and Community Services and I signed up to be a technical team lead. This was only a few weeks after signing up for a two year contract. Now I was going to be living in Canberra and paying $60 / month for broadband in my flat in Melbourne. I would also want broadband in Canberra so it was all going to add up to a lot of money.

A call to Telstra - I called up Telstra to explain my situation, fully expecting to be told that I was stuck in my 2 year contract without much sympathy. To my surprise the lady that I spoke with said they would cancel my contract at the end of the month and leave it at that. I was in Canberra for nine months so that saved me at least $540 and probably more. It was great to see some flexibility coming from Australia's largest teleco, even when it might have cost them some money. Once I got back to Melbourne I got hooked up again with Telstra and can happily download lots of goodies.

You generally expect huge companies to be pretty inflexible. My own expereince has been they often follow their own rules to the detriment of the customer relationship. This time Telstra was flexible and it saved me over a grand