I must say that when I bought my house, and got a phone-line and Internet a year ago, I never thought it would be this much trouble to change things over.

Here’s the ongoing saga.

When I first got my place, one of the first things I did was to try and find an ISP. I searched around using http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/ to see what was available on my exchange, and what was the best deal for me.

To cut a long story short, I went with http://letsgo.com.au/ cos they had a bundled deal (phone and ADSL2+) with a generous 60gb download limit, and no metered uploads and for only $70/month. There were a couple of issues with getting it connected up, but I’m not going into that here. The only thing to comment on with all that was that the Customer Service (while not perfect) was pretty good, and though they were in WA with their time difference, I was talking to actual Aussies.

FF to last week.

On Friday 1st Feb I was logging into the Letsgo members website, to check to see if I had been unshaped, and noticed that the pricing structure had changed, and I had an email telling me that my contract was finishing on Mon 4th Feb.  With the New pricing, I was going to have to pay $40 MORE per month for the service I was already getting, and they were going to change to a on/off-peak structure.

Time to jump ship.

I’ve looked around, and no one offers a bundle deal where the phone price is included in the Internet price. So I ended up concluding that getting a Telstra line, and then getting Internet with TPG’s ADSL2+ Super 2 deal was going to be my best option.

I called TPG to see if I could get their plan installed… I was just trying to do it as a fact finding call.  I was told that they couldn’t tell me, because my phone number couldn’t be confirmed on a Telstra Exchange (that’s what comes with getting a bundled phone from a small ISP in WA). I asked if they could provide me any information, based on my Neighbour’s phone number. Nup. Not a chance… That means I can’t even find out if I can get an account with them until I have changed over to having a Telstra Phone Line.

Next Problem.

I called Telstra to find out about porting my number over to them. The first guy I spoke to didn’t have too much of a clue, and had to keep putting me on hold, so that he could ask someone else. Eventually I was asked if they could give me a call back, to save me my time and phone call.

2.5 Hours later I still hadn’t heard anything, so I tried again.  The Lady who answered was very helpful and knowledgeable. this still was a 47 minute call.  Part of the reason it was so long, was cos I needed to get an account number from Letsgo so that Telstra could process the Porting of the phone number. This was further exacerbated by the Indian Call Centre that couldn’t understand what my username for my account was. Got it all sorted, and then arranged to get my number ported.

Oh, By the way, the earliest that Telstra will even contact me about changing the number is the 19th Feb (there’s a 10Business Day Cooling off Period), and then the next available date in the calendar isn’t until 29th Feb… 🙁

This whole process takes much longer than I would like.

Will let you know when I’m further down this slippery slope.