As a former ISP unfortunately this sort of take it or leave it attitude is symptomatic of the way the industry has gone. Which is why I got out ... we provided totally customer-focused service but even with that, everyone still wanted everything for nothing. Can't be done. We resold Telstra ADSL as one of their first wholesale ADSL customers and everything we have here is Telstra (using my equipment though) for the same reasons as Lwowiak ... better reliability, excellent responsiveness, etc. It was critical to my business that when a customer called that their connection was down that Telstra responded quickly, and they never let me or my customers down. One of the first ADSL connections was into my brother's office. When I quit the business we set up a new connection with a different business-orientated provider. I couldn't convince him to stay with Telstra for some reason. However before the migration we thought back on how often the connection went down in 13 years. TWICE. That's f**king exceptional in anyone's books. Mind you it didn't stop him having an enormous whinge about it at the time. The major players have their own DSLAMs in the Telstra Exchanges, along side Telstra's DSLAMs. Port availability is dependent on whether that ISP's DSLAM has a free port. If not they will tell you "ADSL not available". This means "sorry, we can't plug your line into any of OUR DSLAMs" This could also be that the only DSLAMs with free ports are ADSL1. Get a Service Qualification check done with another provider, or better still, since TLS owns all the exchanges and has the most rack space, ask TLS. As far as distances go, if you're beyond 5km from the exchange don't expect anything. Between 3km and 5km you can get away with ADSL1 because ADSL2+ will be the same speed (DL) anyway. I'm about 4km from my exchange and whether we had ADSL1 Open or ADSL2+, the best we can achieve is about 3Mbps. Then it depends on how good the copper is between you and the exchange, whether the pit is full of water, corroded contacts ... the list goes on! One other advantage with going with TLS is the copper is theirs. If there's a problem with the copper ANYWHERE causing noise, drop-outs, etc. they'll investigate it and fix it. We have a 30pr cable coming here from the pillar (from our dial-up modem days), and when we were having problems with one of our ADSL connections the guy tested every pair, found the cleanest one and moved the line to it. All I had to do was a quick re-cable in the MDF, 20s work. Compare this to a situation where one of my IT customers was experiencing very poor performance with an aforementioned ISP (they had the connection before I started doing their IT stuff). One of the basic tests is "noise margin", tells you how much electrical crap is going on interfering with the ADSL performance. Typically if the noise margin is poor, it's a cable problem. So in order to eliminate premises cabling being the problem in a 100+yr old building we re-cabled the place with CAT5e, new MDFs, etc. Cabling from the network boundary was perfect. Performance was still a problem (slightly better) so conclusion ... the copper to the exchange. Called the ISP ... tough luck buddy, the cabling in the street is the problem and there's nothing we can do about it (because it's not ours). There's a lot to be said for getting Telstra on your side, and that starts with paying them for services. Paying a bit more saves money, hair pulling, teeth gnashing, getting sloshed, psychological counselling ...
