On Sat, 14 Jun 2014, Andrew McGlashan wrote:

Hi Lindsay,

If you are 5km from the exchange by cable, then unless the copper is quite thick, you probably won't even get ANY kind of DSL service.

Now, let's say you are lucky and the cable is thick; chances are the speed will still be low due to the loss of signal over the phone line -- it won't sync high and it will probably have lots of dropouts, particularly if the weather interferes. Telstra is not known for properly maintaining the copper network; they do bandaid fixes on the copper line. This will effect you no matter what provider you have.

-- Kind Regards AndrewM

Many thanks for all the replies, its been most helpfull. A great deal of info to digest. A minor comment, I do not and never will have a mobie phone. Andrew raisies an intersting point in the above. I worked for most of my life as an PMG/Telecom/Telstra tech mostly on inside work lonngline exchange maintence etc. but I have done much work on transmission quality of the customer cable system. I may say I am very dubious of the ability of the cable to my location to work at ADSL frequncies. On a normal dialup using a Maestro Woomera modem, one of the best avalible, it will only manage a connect rate of 19.2 kilobits/sec, this is pathetic. Trying it from a nearby place which is over 2000 metres closer to the exchange produced the same result, ____not_good___. It appears the cable closer to town is no good (not unusual these days) I have known about the ADSL access since I moved in but have no desire to throw money down the drain for a system that is no good. There is still hope though, currently for high speed access I use prepiad Virgin 3G broadband. While this is __very__ expensive it is fast, generally getting 4 to 500 kilobytes/sec transfer rates (I am only a kilometre or so from the tower). Virgin do have a 40 dollar a month plan with a 12 gig data allowance, If you use more it just cuts off (effectively). THe USB modems dont much like the summer heat (common I am told for dongles) but is quite usable still. Virgin does have paymnet options I find reasonable and I have found the company __VERY__ helpfull in support. The 12 gig allowance will be more than enough as I do not do movies or TV or anything like that. Incidently I am JUST out of range of fixed radio NBN (like 3 or 400 metres), being in a valley behind some rising ground. Not that this is an issue. Lindsay