A little history to bring you up to speed.

In 2002, we moved into a new house in a new estate in outer south eastern Melbourne. We had checked prior to moving in that we could get ADSL. We dutifuly put our address into the "Can I get broadband?" website and were pleased to find that yes, we could.

We move in and applied for ADSL. And there started a long, painful and incredibly frustrating journey that continues today.

As it turns out, the "Can I get broadband?" website fails to take into consideration any type of technology blocker to getting ADSL (eg pair gain, RIMs etc). So yes, the Berwick exchange was ADSL-enabled - the RIM we were stuck behind, was not.

So we went from uncapped cable in our old house, to dialup. For people that worked in IT and had a requirement for remote connectivity, we were not happy.

To cut a long story short, the next 2 years saw us fight to have the RIM enabled. While trying to get ADSL into the estate, we were forced to use a one-way satellite service, and later 128K ISDN in order to get the connectivity we required. I had a legacy Telstra direct service that I'd had since 1997 which we used for the satellite uplink.

The Satellite connection had a 3gb per month limit and excess traffic was charged at 25c/mb. Interestingly, while classed as "broadband", this satellite service was excluded from all the 'free sites' that other broadband services enjoyed. Thanks Telstra!

We struggled with one-way sat for a couple of years before we bit the bullet and had 128K Onramp service provisioned. I think it was called Home Highway or something.

At this point we were paying close to $650 a month for "decent" connectivity.

During this time, we had been constantly ringing Telstra and registering our "expression of interest for ADSL" on the ADSL register. Every month we would add our name to the register, and every month would check how many expressions of interest were on the register, only to be told "none". We would go through the process again, add our name to the register again (which would "fall off" the register every month), and rinse and repeat.

We continued applying for ADSL with Internode and the answer was always the same: "no alternative path found". In approximately August 2004, success! (albeit short-lived). Our application was now sitting at "provisioned". Children danced in the street, crowds rejoiced, baby birds twittered. Oh.. what's that? It's Clayton's provisioned? Where "provisioned" means Telstra in their infinite wisdom, transferred us to another RIM... with no spare ports. Great.

So we've gone from first in the queue on a RIM that may be upgraded, to last in the queue on a RIM that is already at capacity. Hurrah! Numerous phone calls to Telstra regarding the transposition and requests for even the tiniest bit of information was met with silence.

One day I was sitting in the local doctor's surgery reading a copy of APC magazine. And I came across the watchdog section. It was a lightbulb moment.