Vodagone

Last week I gave Vodafone the heave and went onto a new plan for my mobile phone. I'd been waiting for this moment from about... hmmm... two weeks into my two year contract, when I discovered the reason why Vodafone Australia has haemorrhaged more than 800,000 customers over the last two years. The lies, the incompetence, the erratic service. The dropped calls. The hopeless Android handset. The downloads that inevitably crashed before they completed. The texts arriving days after they were sent. And of course the fatal blow that came over a year ago, when I snapped a photo at a parade in the city centre and tried to text it to a friend. My friends on other networks did it without problems. I couldn't send mine until the parade was over and I moved to a less telecommunicationally congested part of the city.


So I signed up with iiNet, who lease their service from Optus.


I'm very fond of iiNet - they now provide my home internet, my home phone and my mobile - but Optus is no better than Vodafone. In fact in some ways they're worse. Right now in my office, four kilometres from the city centre, I'm getting three bars. At home, nine kilometres from the city centre, I frequently get one. The downloads seem slower too.


But I'm not complaining... at least not yet. For the same price that I was paying Vodafone, iiNet is giving me eight times more call and text credit, and fifteen times more data. At those rates, I can afford to wait a little longer for a map or a webpage. And at least, unlike Vodafone, it does seem to get there eventually.