The Lurker

ADSL

With Telstra charging me a little under $90 a month for cable now, I've been thinking about moving over to ADSL for quite a while.

I've heard good things about Internode. For the same as I'm paying now I could get 4.5 gigabytes a month, or I could pay $20 less per month and have the same 3 gigabyte download limit.

Netspace's $70 plan has a very low 1 gigabyte limit for peak time, and 2 gig more for off-peak. That would be way too much trouble to work around. Their 3 gig + 7 gig plan would be OK, but it would cost me $10 more a month than Telstra charges me now, and I'm trying to save money.

At first I thought iinet's prices looked great: $80 for 6 gig (plus another 6 gig off-peak), or $70 for 4 + 4. But then I saw the catch: The bliink home products also have the following ports blocked: port 25 (smtp), port 80 (http), port 139 (netbeui/ipx), port 443 (https) — all except for 139 being ports I wouldn't be willing to part with. Port 25 is the most important, because I want to run a mail server for the mooax.com domain here.

One thing I would lose (with all the ADSL providers) is that I wouldn't have uncapped download speeds any more, which I've come to enjoy. Upstream on the reasonably-priced plans is also reduced on the plans I would consider, but I can live with that.