Nah London, partner is Italian though.
Just on leasehold. Ours has around 112 years from memory (i think… Our building is 13 years so, and was 125 years from the start)
Trying to get an extension on the leasehold is a nightmare. They really need to fuck this system off.
My partner is Italian and I’m amazed at how long things take. We registered our daughter as both an Italian and Australian citizen.
The Italian one took double the time of the Australian one. You had to be at consulate in London at a certain day of the month at a certain time just to lodge the paper work.
Does my head in… I guess one day I’ll get Italian citizenship too but god knows how long it’d take
3 Likes
iiNet.
A month ago we requested the free upgrade to FTTP, which included a new free modem with 4G backup option.
The day the modem arrived our existing FTTC connection stopped working… after an hour on the phone they had no idea what had happened, but they said they would call back with more information in an hour. A few hours later I call them and speak to someone who at least seemed to know what he was talking about, and he tells me that someone accidentally deleted my account. But I have the 4G backup in the modem, so I should just use that. Also the NBN guy is coming within the week, so everything should be fine. We have some of the worst mobile signal in Sydney… but okay, we can make it work as long as it’s not raining.
It rains. We move the modem around until the signal improves, kind of like the old days with TV antennae.
The NBN guy comes and sets up everything inside, no problem. The outside connection is an issue though, so he’ll need to call a second team to remedy that. That will be more than a week. Okay, we have the 4G backup option at least.
On Tuesday this week, our internet goes down again. At exactly the same time as this, I get a text message from iiNet telling me my NBN Service Request has been withdrawn! WTF?!?!? I ring them again to find out what happened. They claim that in order to have a FTTP upgrade you need to upgrade from FTTC, so they put in a request for a new FTTC service. But they didn’t tell me this! The 4G backup got tied to that. No one can tell me why this FTTC request was cancelled. The NBN will now be upgraded in 4 weeks… even though I don’t have a FTTC connection.
At this point I lost my shit with them. Can they send me a new back up SIM? No, sorry. So I start talking about the Ombudsman… and now I have an “interim” SIM being sent out to me. It will arrive in 3-5 business days. Can they expedite that? Oh no, we have a deal with Startrack, and everything is 3-5 business days, no exceptions. What bullshit. I just ordered new roller blinds on Tuesday and they were manaufactured in Melbourne and will arrive today. This is a fucking SIM card that I can buy from Coles. Yes, it needs to be pre-configured, but that would take minutes!
So fuck iiNet, once this is done I’m leaving after almost 20 years.
Any suggestions? Anyone used Spindel? They seem to have good deals.
Ask your partner about il muro di gomma, it’s one of Italy’s greatest inventions. 
1 Like
Aussie broadband are good, little bit more expensive but the service is sensational when you do need to speak to them.
1 Like
Try being Polish. My parents had their passports and citizenship revoked when they got kicked out of the country (communism). In 2007 they were in Poland to try and get everything sorted. The Polish Government had a system that helped people displaced by Communism and the war get all their docs sorted etc. The problem is that it all starts with a Social Security number. Now to get the number, you need to have an address in Poland. To register for an address in Poland, you need to have a social security number. It took them about 2 weeks of arguing with government officials before they actually managed to find the only person that understood the issue and sorted it out for them.
We’re with AGL and they’re fine. Works out cheaper if you bundle everything with them. Only frustrating thing is their support network is a bit iffy.
Funnily enough I tried to go with TPG years ago and they were absolutely crap and iiNet came in to save the day…
iiNet is absolute garbage. I’ve long punted them into the void.
I know some people hate TPG, but I don’t recall any issues with them, and I’ve had them for several years. Though I’ve also rarely, if ever, have had to speak to them once I signed up.
Wow, that’s crazy.
My grandparents were Polish (migrated to Australia post WW2) so I know all about it haha.
1 Like
In Sydney the first available appointment is November.
I discovered recently (see my TPG rant from a month or so ago in this very thread) that every complaint to the ombudsman costs the ISP a couple of hundred bucks, regardless of the outcome. So just the mere mention seems to make them sit up and listen.
For what it’s worth I went with Leaptel (good reviews from the boffins on Whirlpool forums), and they had a deal that is NBN250 for roughly the same as I was paying TPG for NBN50.
So far so good with them. No complaints.
(I’m on HFC though, so I can’t get the free FTTP upgrade yet…unless I want to pay $15-20k)
I’m very certain that TPG acquired iiNet a couple of years ago that might explain the decline.
In the early days they were the best available and changed the market by offering shaping to the mass market in ADSL.
That said, I was on TPG ADSL2 then TPG FTTB then now on fttb on the nbn and they’re ok, but I haven’t had to deal with their customer service in any meaningful way for over a decade.
I think I dropped iinet before Covid, and I was highly dissatisfied with them then. I guess it goes to show how experiences can vary wildly from person to person.
We purchased our place with 99 years left, it was originally 125 years I could see from the documents when we bought. With 112 years left, I wouldn’t bother doing anything until it drops into the 90s. With the leasehold reform which is on the horizon, it should make the process much easier + cheaper and the automatic number of years it will be extended by will be 999 years.
Saw someone steal a guys phone this morning at 7:30am outside my flat. Just rode past on a bike, grabbed it from behind him and rode off before he could even react.
Such scummy people. It’s been a massive problem here the last 5-6 years, but I’m hearing about it even more than usual recently. Seems like people are being targeted in much quieter spots now, whereas the past it was always on main roads, outside tube stations etc.
Is it a problem in Sydney too? I’m always so vigilant, but I do worry about my Camera in particular getting nicked, I’ve had some people clearly scoping me out follow me before when I’ve been out taking photos.
It happened to my wife in Waterloo just a couple of months after we’d moved from China in 2015. She got shaken up pretty bad by it.
I’ve seen it outside the school I work at. Broad daylight in the middle of Bethnal Green.
So scary
Well, you go live in overcrowded, third world shit holes …
3 Likes
Hearing the Energy Minister constantly pronouncing nuclear as nuculah.