Internode used to be a high quality home internet brand.
My understanding is that loyalty is never rewarded for competitive subscription services (gas, eletricity, water, internet, insurance, etc).
I wonder how long until AussieBB enshitifies?
The end of an era indeed.
Internode WOULD NOT move you off a grandfathered plan.
I rode that until I had to move somewhere without FTTP :-(
There isn't much to differentiate ISPs anymore. It used to be a huge benefit to have unmetered, low latency game servers, streaming radio mirrors, usenet feeds, IP phone services and ISP email. Internet offered a huge amount of extra value through the dialup, ISDN, ADSL1, ADSL2 era. They offered IPv6 early which was interesting to a techie early adopter and were rolling out ADSL2+ in some exchanges and wireless systems. I stuck with Internode for a long time because if your system just works there isn't a lot of incentive to chase other providers who are more or less the same. In the NBN era they were a bit slow to deal with congestion a couple of times and I ended up moving to Superloop. I don't know that Superloop are anything special but that is kind of the point these days. The industry is commoditised and as long as their network and billing is competently run all the NBN resellers should be fairly comparable.
Latency is particularly important to me. Indirectly this means congestion, available bandwidth and buffering policies.
I run SQM on my home router, this keeps things like web browsing buttery smooth even if someone starts torrenting. The ability for SQM to have control over the connection relies on it being the weakest/slowest/most controlling link (I configure it to a bandwidth slightly slower than my normal connection speed). If a router somewhere in the NBN/ISP networks starts buffering my packets heavily (ie my connection speed drops) then my SQM loses its control and ability to fix things.
That's quite a mouthful :P All I know is that with Aussie things have been OK, but that's also probably because I'm on one of the lower tier speed plans. Higher speeds might fluctuate.
ISPs would definitely compete if they ran on different medium; but mobile broadband is hit an miss and I don't see any other affordable alternatives to the NBN at the moment. Starting up a community WISP sounds romantic but I'm sure it's a lot of work and I live in the suburbs, not the urbs, so it'd probably be hard to find participants.
Honestly, they were on the verge of falling apart. All their gear was old.
Had ihug not been bought when they were, their Internet service would have collapsed within a year.
