Well after a few month’s deliberation, I decided to switch to Internode as my ISP last Tuesday. While I wasn’t unhappy with iinet as a service provider, it really came down to a value-for-money decision. Having 4 teenagers in the house, meant that we seemed to be every month hitting 10+10GB quota I had with iinet. And while some of them could make use of the off-peak download time by scheduling downloads, it really isn’t all that convenient. And all to often it seemed that at least once a month someone would get the time wrong to start or finish downloads so we would have inadvertant creepage into the peak quota. However for the same $70 is was spending at iinet, I could get 40GB monthly quota, with no time restrictions – so hopefully there will be no more draconian filtering by yours truly to keep us under quota.
Internode (like iinet) are very Linux friendly (in that they can provide support for Linux users if required) but more importantly they both provide good unmetered repositories/mirrors of open-source software. Internode seems to have the edge though, especially now they are a Sourceforge mirror. They also have some nice unmetered media with quite a few radio streams. Another clincher for the recent decision was that Internode now provide ABC’s iView unmetered, which all made good use of on iinet. According to my kids the gaming servers are well supported and have low “ping” times, so all should be good on that front. Actually one nice thing the Internode does is publish a very clear list of IP address ranges that are unmetered. I might try to combine this info with the netflow info I have been grabbing from my router to more accurately feedback to my family on their metered/unmetered usage profiles.
We also have made use of iinet’s bundled phone PSTN and VoIP services. However this actually proves to more costly than what it should be. With iinet to get my $70 ADSL plan I needed to bundle the phone service at around $33 (though I got free VoIP access). But with Internode, I can get the $70 ADSL (with 2x quota) and I can buy my phone service from Telstra (I’ll choose the $19 budget plan), and then I can buy a $10 VoIP service which comes with $20 phone credits. All up, I expect to save maybe $20 a month and get double the data quota. Internode by all accounts have a good service reputation, so I really have no qualms in switching.
So I am still happy to recommend iinet for their level of customer service, however despite a few calls to them indicating I was about to leave, and giving them an opportunity to keep me, they really couldn’t match Internode’s pricing.
Hopefully all goes well.