Wireless Internet

Be careful of terminology. There are two different set of plans being offered on Next-G - Telstra and BigPond. The Telstra plans have the advantages of being able to start and stop them if you own your wireless device but not if you bundle it. The BigPond plans are for a fixed period but cheaper - 1 year if you own your wireless device - if you bundle it the minimum is 2 years. This is where Montemoo came to grief as stated in the next reply - he took the Telstra option and bundled his wireless device.

The link Notso gave is for the BigPond plans. I purchased the BigPond wireless modem ($250 but they are now $200) and was able to connect for a 1 year plan which is not as bad as being tied up for 2 years. I opted for the slower speed and got 1G for $50/month. I could get away with 300Mbit /month but if I went over (which I am this month) it would cost a lot more than the $10 extra I am paying.

Other forums are also promoting the BigPond wireless modem as the best value for volume. If you can survive on just a few Mbit/month I would suggest you look at plans with Telstra where you use your mobile phone as the wireless interface. They will work out a little cheaper - if you don't exceed your limit. Purchase a phone with a USB cable or bluetooth for the inter-connection to your lap top.

PeterD
ps all prices have been rounded to the nearest whole $A.

Notso
I would love to know how the wireless internet can fall back to 3G when there is no wireless ,I guess your username tells the story

JJ54
Never mind the 3G , or whatever, just get on with Bigpond on Next G Wireless, remember Mobile is more expensive than Modem , Modem will need a 240 supply. if you have an inverter then that's the cheaper of the 2 systems that really use the same Next G. go to bigpond website and check it out for yourself

Site Link

GOOD LUCK !

I fought them and came up against 7 of their lawyers in court.

I kinda lost.

You will certainly be told that finding a better option is no grounds for being released from a contract.

Maybe you could ask your family to reduce the file size of the photos that they are sending you.

Hi, it's not that I "found a better option" but that when I asked the staff at Telstra what my options were they said "This plan or payout your CDMA internet and go elsewhere"...they didn't even tell me about the Bigpond option which they actually sell in their shop. If told about it I would have certainly paid out my plan and paid full price for the turbo-modem and then signed up for the $54.95/month plan for 12 months with 20hrs of highspeed access. I want to get released from the contract on the grounds that they didn't give me all the options available to me.

This situation happened to me however there was a small difference.

I had the CDMA minimax on a $49 per month plan with 20 hours a month. I migrated to NextG with Telstra Mobile, got the orange USB Turbo Modem and asked to go on the same plan. Sweet.

Got the first bill and it said I was on 200Mb/month Plan.

I went and saw the manager at the Telstra shop and it turned out that the customer sales staffer had mistakenly entered me on the wrong plan. I asked to be put on the timed plan (with NextG speeds you can burn 200Mb in under an hour!) and he said "no worries, sorry about that, we will change your plan".

In the month that I had had the device Telstra had withdrawn the timed plans for the Telstra Mobile Turbo Modems. You can only get data allowance plans with these now. If you want a timed plan they are only available on the Bigpond plans.

The Bigpond device is identical to the Telstra Turbo modem but is a different colour/logo and uses different driver software. With Bigpond you pay for the device upfront and then go on a usage plan.

I kicked up quite a stink as there was no way I was going to pay $54.95 (note the price increase as well) for 200Mb a month (that I could kill in 1 hour) against $49 a month for 20 hours of all you can eat (that I signed up for).

The Telstra Shop Manager said there was no way I could be connected to the time based plan with the Telstra Turbo modem (when Telstra withdraw a plan it just cannot be accessed by the sales staff on the computer) so he cancelled the entire service and gave me a Bigpond USB modem retail package free of charge (normally $299). I then took it home and signed up online to the $34.95, 12 month, 10 hours a month plan.

Now I am quite happy. I pay for 10 hours a month when I am not travelling and can bump up the plan to a higher allowance in months when we do longer trips. I have Cable at home so when we are not travelling it only gets used occasionally so 10 hours is sufficient. The killer though is that in that 10 hours I can download WAY more than 200Mb of data.

Like you I did not know and was not informed of the Bigpond offering when I initially upgraded from CDMA - even though they are sold in the same shop buy the same sales staff. I would be just raising a stink about this if I were you.

In my case there was that error by the sales staff that put me on the incorrect plan so that may have helped me get what I want but you can only try! Keep at it.

Cheers
Muddy

The real options are to go BigPond and not Telstra. There is a subtle difference even though they both use the next-G network.

PeterD

See my followup on the reply above. Time based plans are only available on the Bigpond plans. Not the Telstra Mobile plans.

Muddy

Used with a laptop

Hi Jason,

Can you just elaborate on the last bit of your reply as I am a bit in the dark about this stuff.

When you refer to all of the wireless hotspots around the place, I am presuming you still have to be subscribed to some wireless provider to access them wouldn't you?

My laptop picks up on them as we travel around.

I would be appreciative of a bit more info on this.

Thanks.

Jason you are spot on about picture sizes, for viewing on a computer screen 100kb is more than adequate. It really annoys me when people persist in sending massive file sizes when much smaller files will do the same job. I work in an industry where emailing photos is a huge part of our day to day operations & most shots we send are under 60kb, we've never had a complaint yet.
It is very easy to optimise a photo for email purposes, but then I guess laziness is probably a contributing factor.

Jason

Wireless hot spots are far and few when you get away from the eastern coast. My wifes laptop has an 802.11 card in it that defaults to on - haven't seen a wireless signal since leaving Qld some weeks ago. Those we saw in caravan parks are expensive up to $10 per discontinuous hour. Whilst on the east coast and adding together the costs of those we could access the BigPond wireless modem is cheaper and much more convenient.

Shaker

It is not all lazyness - the newer members have no idea that this is necessary or know how to do it.

PeterD

Shaker

I would make a million if I could set up an e-mail filter to do it .

Members new to this :

Quickest way around the BIG file sizes encountered when sending pictures via e-mail is to go into the settings of your camera AFTER you have taken your happy snaps for yourselves. In the settings there should be an 'e-mail' setting. Select that and then take the photos you want to send off.

After you transfer the photos over to your computer, search for the photos that are small compared to the rest in size (megs). Do what you are normaly doing after that with these smaller photos.

Don't worry about the quality of the photos, the camera software takes the same photo with a whole lot less pixels . It looks the same but will not be able to be printed off at high quality.

You will find instant results on your downloads and will save you a heap of money if you are with Telstra.

Disco,

I hear you. I am just not the biggest fan of Telstra and their new next G setup. They could have made it one whole lot cheaper. I suspect if they did , shareholders will loose out.

I am a Telstra Broadband customer at home. I am because there is not another provider.

I am not baging anyone on the next G network. It is cutting edge stuff. New technology is where it is at. Without it , we would all be back buying 486's for $3000. I am trying to point out that there is alternatives. I travel and take the laptop for GPS work, e-mail and news , surfing. I do this without next G.

I am with Disco and and Gob and Denny above about Next G. I have been on it now for nearly two months, from home and away. I posted from the Warraweena homestead for some remote access trial nearly two weeks ago. I got pretty good speed of access with a CDMA antenna just sat on the top of the ute. Just a base loaded short wire one of about 4dB gain sat on a magnetic base.

People in cities where they have options to Telstra are sitting pretty for any broadband speed, or 802.11 hotspots. I have used free internet in several places around the world, including Hong Kong, and the US. In Australia, to suggest you are going to find free hotspots apart from airport lounges, you just don't know your country. I say that knowing that some poach private internet wireless time. My ethics haven't stooped as low as those people. $5 an hour, as suggested below, in Big4 parks isn't cheap against wireless and LAN systems in some US hotels.

The plan that suited me has been the 256kbs speed option at 1gig a month for $50 a month. It's about as good as the ISDN offering I have had but been more reliable. People in the city were there is competition, just don't know they are living, perhaps you are one Jason, but then I see you went to court with them. I don't particularly like my options but they are between Buckleys and none. It is heaps better than satellite even just for a home system from all I hear from satellite users and the after sales support they just don't get.

Travellers warning:- If anyone likes to read newspapers online as I like to see from time to time, get your browser windows off The Australian as it seems to hog bandwidth as it gets updates very often. Its seems worse than getting radar updates from multiple windows of the BOM. It's just as much a wealth hazard as Bigpond itself.

David

Where a lot of us go there are not many Big-4 parks. Where there are Big-4 parks there are generally better value parks. So if we accept your 10H @ $55 we still have to look for internet cafes and such places that will let us connect our computers for $3-6 per half hour. When we do this we pay big bucks and have limited time on line. If we pay for a download/upload service we don't expend time whilst we type answers to newsgroups like this, we only reduce our limits when we press the enter key.

For $50/month I can carry on with my same activities when away as when at home - provided I keep away from things like Google earth. In fact I have been thinking of canceling my home service and surviving on my BigPond wireless modem.

PeterD