Telemarketers are a pet hate of mine. I’ve made my point about them before, so I won’t repeat it.

Tonight we had a different class of telemarketing. That is… a company that you do have dealings with, contacting you to advertise another service. In this instance, it was Telstra offering us a discounted internet service. We currently have our telephone services (a landline and two mobiles) with them.

My disagreement with this sort of marketing is one of principle. We pay you to provide us a service, we do not pay you to pay telemarketers to harass us via the aforementioned service. I’ve also had SMS messages on my phone from Telstra, thankfully this is rare.

Now… they’ve unwittingly called us thinking we’re the typical non-technical household. Okay, fine, they weren’t to know that. However, one would think the telemarketers would know something about the product they’re selling. I initially answered the phone, and of course, when the woman at the other end asked for my father (who holds the account) I naturally transferred her.

A few points:

  • She did not seem to understand the limitations of what was being sold… yes, Cable internet is theoretically faster than ADSL… especially 512/128kbps ADSL (which is what we have). But cable is a shared medium, ADSL isn’t.
  • My father immediately asked about getting a static IP address. She had no clue what this was. Tsk tsk tsk… Internetworking 101 people.

The plan offered was only discounted (half price) for 12 months, after which, the price would double, resulting in a monthly rate only marginally less than that offered by our current ISP, who we’ve had a service with since 1996 and have been quite happy with.

Should an ISP be thinking of offering their services… first and foremost, don’t contact us with your offers… if we were looking to change, we’ll contact you. However, since Telstra have come to us, I guess that gives us the right to dictate what we expect… Our expectations:

  • Static IP is a must. (At last check, Telstra only offer this on ADSL for an extra $10/month… not sure if this has changed)
  • IPv6 native is highly preferred, but a tunnel is livable (currently we have one via AARNet)
  • We must be able to run our own server with any arbitrary service we choose including but not limited to:
    • HTTP and HTTPS
    • DNS
    • SMTP (both directions)
    • IMAP/IMAPS
    • NTP
    • XMPP
    • SSH
    • OpenVPN tunnels
    • IRC
    • VoIP services (including Skype, EchoLink and Ekiga… not ruling out D-Star, IRLP or other systems in future either)
  • We must be permitted to maintain, reconfigure and replace any and all network infrastructure components within our property boundary at our discretion… This includes choice of hardware and software!
  • In the event of a problem, I expect to talk to a competent tech support person who at least understands basic networking principles such as the TCP/IP model (or the OSI model which it is frequently compared to)
  • Related to the above, when contacting tech support, I expect that any findings I report are taken on board, and that appropriate troubleshooting techniques are used. I did not go to university studying IT and EE for 6.5 years for nothing!

Some of this is due to frustrations I’ve had with ISPs, particularly Telstra when troubleshooting issues on others’ behalf, and hitting this exact problem of being treated like a dummy because the other end is only reading a script. iTel haven’t given us any issue thus far… it’d be nice if they offered native IPv6, but that’s about my only nit I have with them… they’ve provided a very reliable service and haven’t gotten in our way. Whenever there has been a problem, it has been quickly identified and rectified. Thus, we have no reason to change… finance alone is not going to cut it.

Specific to Telstra… it’d be nice if they fixed the broken DNS server that fails to resolve yi.org domains. (If you have trouble viewing my site directly, but can see my post on Planet Gentoo… try changing your DNS server settings over to an alternate one such as OpenDNS, then please contact your ISP about it.)

The telemarketer tonight had to end the call prematurely while she found out from her employer whether static IP addresses were possible with the plan they were about to try and sell us. She’s apparently going to call back tomorrow evening. All I can say is watch out for low-flying aircraft.