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    Telstra making it seriously easy for VIPs to upgrade to the NBN

    Around 2 weeks ago, I received an email from Telstra regarding the NBN being available at my current rental address in Wodonga. The multi-billion dollar project was now at my doorstep. This was my chance to move from the aging ADSL2+ connection to FTTN.

    To give you some background, I’ve been a BigPond subscriber for a number of years and am actually out of contract right now. The unsolicited email was a welcome one, when I discovered the transition to the NBN was set to be a smooth one. Telstra had sent a new router, free of charge to my house and the email contained a link to track the delivery.

    The email contained a link to https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband/nbn/nbn-kit which gives users an overview of what to expect and the included video (unlisted) had just 6,000 views at the time I first seen it. This may give you a sense of the scale of this ‘valued customer’ program, its not for everyone and unfortunately I can’t tell you the determining factors to get on this list.

    A couple of days later, the new Telstra Gateway arrived. I disconnected my old router, connected the new one and after booting, I had new WiFi networks available. After customising the WiFi SSID name(s) and passwords to match my old network names, my device were back online. A few days later, I received another email to confirm my account had been upgraded to an NBN account. I was finally part of the Government’s multi-billion dollar project, so what about the speeds?

    With the ADSL2+ connection, I first received speedtests results around 17Mbps down and around 900Kbps up. Over the 3 years I’ve been there, speeds have decreased as the congestion from neighbours impacted our speeds. In recent times, we are luck to get 14-15Mbps down and 700Kbps up. At peak times, the speed dropped as low as 10Mbps down and 400Kbps up. While this was enough to stream Netflix and browse the web, if my Surface Pro 3 running Windows 10, was trying to simultaneously upload files to OneDrive, we’d suffer buffering. Streaming live online was also off the table with such a constrained upload speed.

    After the upgrade to the NBN, with no plan change, my speedtests now return some much more impressive numbers. I’m getting 20.46Mbps down and 5.23Mbps up. If I was staying put, I’d definitely increase my plan to get even more speed, but I’m only a couple weeks away from moving into a brand new home where I’ll have FTTP NBN on a 100/40Mbps plan.

    If you’re a Telstra customer and get this VIP email, its a great offering and makes the process of moving to the NBN ridiculously easy. If you’re a competitor to Telstra, good luck trying to steal customers away during their transition to the NBN. While we received letters in the mail from at least half a dozen other ISPs, none can compete with this offering.

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    Jason Cartwright
    Jason Cartwrighthttps://techau.com.au/author/jason/
    Creator of techAU, Jason has spent the dozen+ years covering technology in Australia and around the world. Bringing a background in multimedia and passion for technology to the job, Cartwright delivers detailed product reviews, event coverage and industry news on a daily basis. Disclaimer: Tesla Shareholder from 20/01/2021

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