Comments are correct - there are no ‘great’ mobile service providers, but your best option is the choice of least pain & suffering.

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Secondly from the grassy knoll, quite unrelated, a month back I got an offer for $100 plus to carry an advert on my micro blog. Searched the web for background on the company. Many micro bloggers similar experience, but demonstrably not commercial value. What gives? I declined the offer.

Yesterday read a link via crikey to authoritive tech mag long feature with lots of referencing - spooks are rolling out popular culture monitoring on blogosphere. A bit like that fictional character played by Robert Redford in 3 Days of the Condor whose job was to crunch …. popular culture for real intelligence. Just a film script I suppose.

Now ‘I’ve been thinking’ as John Saffran would say, how better than to insert some code obscurely, and willingly accepted, on blogs with pretensions to orginal material, of interest but otherwise of no commercial value?

But then other things started to go wrong. I have two land lines, they were transposed and one was cut off. No house telephone, no fax, no internet - for about a month. And I eventually discovered that my mobile had been put on a $10 plan, costing me a fortune. Back to the TIO, hours on the telephone to call centre drones who could not give a damn, until, after an enraged letter to the entire Telstra Board, I was transferred to some sort of secret major complaints centre where the staff had Fahrenheit IQs.

Now I find, together with many of my neighbours in Ocean Grove, that Internet download speed is all of a sudden crap. My ISP has tried hard to sort out the problem with little success and evidence is growing that Telstra is, again, the cause of a problem. The local exchange is steam driven and all the other hardware outside Geelong is said to have come out on the First Fleet.

We should never have allowed the Industrial Revolution to go ahead.

I don’t think you can lump all service providers in the one (poor) basket.

I have over the years had a good run with Westnet as an internet and phone provider, and would recommend them to anybody.

Some of us can’t just walk.

We recently moved from Perth to a Yanchep, which is a new new regional centre being built approx 60kms north. We checked that broadband was available prior to committing, as we do work from home and need reliable access. We had a long term relationship with Westnet, and assumed a simple transfer would be possible.

It was only after committing, and actually moving into the new house that we found it was not that easy. Apparently Telstra has an arrangement with the developers in this, and other, new areas where Telstra wire the area and retain exclusive control of the access. Other providers cannot gain access to the area.

And so, we have moved from what in our opinion is the best service provider we have dealt with - Westnet - to Telstra. And am finding it difficult - but cannot ‘just walk’.

I guess you win some, and lose some.

True story 1 - A few years ago when changing my mobile account from pre-paid to monthly plan with Telstra I asked whether global roaming was automatically transferred - yes, I was told. So off I few to South America only to have no phone reception. To cut a long story short I emailed and rang at least six times in four weeks and kept being told that global roaming was available on my account and should be working - but of course it was not. In the transit lounge in Auckland on the way BACK to Australia I got a text message from Telstra saying ‘welcome to global roaming’. My mobile account is now with another company.

True story 2 - we only have a landline in our flat to enable broadband access so the fussing around with the phone account is completely disproportionate to the degree to which we use the phone - but anyway - in January this year my flatmate decided he would move out in June and so we decided we should get the Telstra landline account changed from his name to mine. Every month we rang and spent at least 15-30mins being transferred, interrogated, told conflicting things and eventually reassured that the account would be in my name on the next month’s bill. It was not. He left the country and the rest of us did not receive a bill for a while so I assumed the name had changed and Telstra had defaulted to quarterly rather than monthly billing. Then the phone was disconnected. I rang Telstra to find out why and it transpired (after a lot of time and transfers) that after six attempts they had in fact changed the bill into my name - but sent the bills to my old address in Hobart instead of my current address in Melbourne - thus because we hadn’t paid the bill for two months they disconnected it! The person who discovered this was very apologetic and was gracious enough to waive the disconnection fee give it was their fault we did not receive the bills for two months - but I still had to pay the two months bills before they would reconnect. I have also been trying to get itemised bills for the same account but that’s another story….

That is the only way that the message will be received by Telstra management and the other idiots driving similarly poorly customer focussed businesses. Once the cusotmer exodus begins to bite profitability, you can rest assured that each will launch it’s own “customers first” program.

The cycle can be shown to have happened to many other companies.

Sooner or later they will get the message - or their competitors will just crunch them. But, simply put, the onus is on every person who experiences this rubbish treatment to walk their business elsewhere

Secondly the call centre for the TIO is in Australia (on Collins Street Melbourne).

I don’t understand why people don’t use the Ombudsman’s set up for Finance, Gov and Telecommunications.

I’ve had dealings with the Banking (now Finance) and Telecommunications Ombusdman and have had satisfactory outcomes both times.

I suffered all five steps above, plus another one. A customer lack-of-service rep suggested I call Foxtel! When I protested that Foxtel had nothing to do with my Bigpond internet he insisted.

I was skeptical, especially when he said that Telstra rents its cable from Foxtel (when I know it is the other way around) but desperate, so I called Foxtel. Of course a bemused rep there told me Foxtel had nothing to do with my Bigpond internet.

It took three weeks of this palava before I could finally convince them to send a technician. When he arrived, he identified the problem in seconds as a dodgy Telstra modem. He then proceed to unbox and connect 5 brand new modems before he found one that wasn’t faulty.

I’m finally now connected.