With the need for more than the current quota 500Mb of traffic allowed at home (256Kbps shaped to 56Kbps), it was time to switch plans… and given that change was in the air, no holds would be barred. The current spend is about $75/month including Internet, two mobiles, fixed line rental and phone calls. Mobile calls are carried on the Optus network; coverage and performance is satisfactory.

ADSL2 connections are cheaper than ADSL1 because of the Telstra monopoly. The current provider offers ADSL2, but they don’t have their own DSLAMs in my local exchange, so they resell Telstra product. Because of the need to maintain profit margins and Telstra’s pricing regime, the base-level product is $70/month. That doesn’t leave much room for calls or mobiles.

www.adsl2exchanges.com.au shows both the locations and coverage of exchanges around Australia, and importantly also lists (as does whirlpool.net, based on your phone number) what companies have DSLAMs installed. The Google maps mash-up showing the boundaries and location of the exchange allows you to estimate the distance to the exchange, which impacts the achievable line speed. Given we’re planning on moving sometime in the future, this information will also be used in selecting a new home – and because we vaguely know where that is, it would be desirable to have a provider that has DSLAMs in both our current and out future exchanges.

For me, that means Telstra, iiNet and TPG. Telstra is immediately excluded as being a bad idea. There are a bunch of iiNet resellers, and iiNet themselves, but the best deals seem to be from Netspace (I understand that they’ve been bought out by iiNet, so I expect plans bought from them will be grandfathered, but after that all bets are off).

Netspace’s most attractive plan is their ADSL2+ Super 20 Anytime plan, which bundles ADSL2 ($30) with a PSTN line ($30) and gives 20Gb of qutoa (plus another 20Gb off-peak, but when the hell is anyone awake between 2am and 8am?). Just as we were signing up, we noticed that the phone line isn’t $30 a month – it’s $40 and includes $10 of calls. If we made $10 of calls, that would be fine. But we don’t. So it’s not. Besides which, it pushes the plan to $70, leaving $5/month to run two mobiles. Next…

For less quota (15Gb) and more money ($40 instead of $30) Netspace has ADSL2+ Super 15 Anytime, their naked product. This would require VoIP, but given we’ve got $25 to play with, that’s do-able. The only problem is, at the end of the contract, what will the prices be? iiNet, Netspace’s future owner, doesn’t have the super-attractive plans; their cheapest naked plan is $50 and is 5Gb (even less for even more). On the upside, Netspace is does Single Service Transfer, which means about 10mins of Internet outage when the swap-over occurs (iiNet is not, so swapping away at the end of contract will be painful and expensive). Shaping is to dial-up speeds (56Kbps).

No one resells TPG ports. TPG’s cheapest naked plan is $50 for 20Gb (+20Gb), but interestingly they have a $51 plan that includes a phone line! Well, $61 because of the included $10 of calls. Apparently it’s a POTS line, but it does sound like a VoIP thing they’re pretending is a PSTN line. Oh, and the call prices are at full retail (25c local calls, timed national, 40c/minute mobiles), not crazy-go-nuts VoIP prices (~10c calls to landlines, ~25c/minute mobile calls). But they do number porting and give you 130Gb of quota, shaped down to 1Mbps when (!) you exceed it. That’s a bit of a step up from 500Mb and 256Kbps shaped to 56Kbps. But, if you wanted to use crazy-go-nuts VoIP prices, you’d just set yourself up with a VoIP provider. So let’s pretend this really is a PSTN line. It’s $9 less the then Netspace includes-phone-line offer, and you get 130Gb instead of 20 (which I can’t imagine using, so no advantage there).

So, the choice comes down to TPG’s Super Fast Standard /130GB ($61) vs Netspace’s naked ADSL2+ Super 15 Anytime ($40 + VoIP provision). $21/month is a lot of money to buy VoIP with, so I think, perhaps, there’s a winner. We can get a ported number and all the calls we’d make for about $10 from a bunch of VoIP providers.

As for the mobiles, TPG has a $1/month mobile plan with really good per-minute rates – and, importantly, no included calls. They provide bonus data to TPG customers on this mobile plans, but given I don’t use data on my mobile plan – meh, not a compelling reason to sign up with TPG. Each phone has a $20 sign-up fee. I’d expect our phone call costs to be… $5 or maybe $10 a month on this plan.

So, if we go with Netspace for the naked DSL and TPG for the mobiles, our monthly spend will be about $60.