Brickbats and bouquets - an ongoing series

This is actually a bouquet wrapped round a brickbat. Those in Australia, and thus familiar with the term "shit sandwich" may like to reflect on whether these term are different. From my view
  • I deal out the adulterated floral products; but
  • receive the contaminated bread.

On this day I noticed that my internet connection was running very very slowly. There didn't seem to be a reason for this in the context of the setup on my 'pooter and Francie's machine was also very slow. So I checked my ISP plan. Stone the corvids, I had gone over my limit. No idea why, I usually don't get within a mile of it.

So I buy some more bandwidth (for $19.95). The fact that they didn't send out a warning email constitutes a pair of brown slices to me (and the first refractory to be placed amongst the roses).

I then start looking more around the Netspace website and find that if I switch to ADSL2 I can get 10Gb anytime for the same cost as I am currently paying for 1Gb peak time +1Gb off-peak. Another well tanned contribution to my diet!

So I ring Netspace to find out if I can swap to ADSL2 (since I don't know which phone exchange I am on). It turns out I am on the Hoskinstown exchange which has no ADSL2 ports. After a bit of muttering to the very pleasant young lady she says that I am on an old plan and I could change it to a "5gb any time" plan for the same cost!! I think this counts as a well filled, and very brown, loaf.

I did thank the young lady for pointing this out to me but asked why I wasn't automatically put on the new plan. She said that people object to being automatically upgraded - which is fair enough in some circumstances, but not when it would reduce the effective cost of the service by about 60%.

So they get a bouquet for the better plan, but it is wrapped around the bricks of their appalling information provision.

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