Catching Up
At last I’ve got organised to post to the blog. We left home on 13th July (despite being Black Friday) and are now in Melbourne, 4250km later. I made the mistake of choosing a time based plan at NextG Bigpond and that doesn’t allow for the browsing around and cutting and pasting that you need to do for blog entries. I’ve now changed to a Gigabyte a month plan which is much better as I can leave the modem on all day.
Otherwise the NextG account has been amazing. We have connected to the Internet everywhere except the centre of the Nullarbor and only needed the antenna once. The Beta software for the Mac is a bit buggy but works OK. The main problem being that it won’t reconnect after a sleep and you have to restart the computer and reset the preferences. There is a now an official Mac release on the Bigpond site which claims to fix this.
If Telstra got their pricing right and made the plans a bit more flexible, they could make it very hard for any competitor to get into this market but at this stage the plans are very limited. $35 for 10 hours a month and $9 an hour for every hour over! $55 for 20 hours a month and $9 an hour for every hour over! And that’s it – no plan over 20 hours a month.
$85 for 1 GB at slow speed (256kbps) or 500MB at high speed (1.5Mbps). Bigpond plans are different to Telstra plans and the modems are a different colour!
Who at Telstra dreams these things up?
Next entries will back track and fill in the gaps.
