Internode used to be a high quality home internet brand

Back when Simon ran it, sure. That's a looooong time ago though. iiNet also used to be a really good home internet provider. Like Internode, they were an ISP built by techies, for techies.

So far, I'm still happy with Aussie BB. But, they're listed now. That means they have shareholders to keep happy. That said, on my FTTP, they (very quickly) passed on the nbn price cut to me, which was nice.

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 :-(

Sad times. I remember spending a lot of time playing CS on internode servers.

Aussie are already headed down the toilet. They changed his they billed me without asking and then denied it for 6 months. TIO complaint ensued where my desired outcome was an apology and that they would notify others before changing billing parameters.

TIO eventually left it with Aussie to sort and they refused to help.

It was an unusual situation, their change to least cost routing incurred transaction fees on my (very) small business account, which lead to issues with my subscription accounting package on a basic plan that had limited line items it could reconcile (about 10 per month I think).

It's a specifically shitty situation, but my setup at the time was reasonable given my circumstances.

Had Aussie told me they were switching I could have changed to direct debit, but remember, it took 6 months to figure out it was them while they denied it the whole time.

I do tech support on an occasional basis when I'm well, and even dismissing my past history with Aussie I still find them going down hill with regards to inflated pricing and slowing support.

Their support is still above average, but at the prices they're adding it bloody should be.

cries in ihug

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 hey were a bit slow to deal with congestion a couple of times and I ended up moving to Superloop. I don't think they 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.