On Wednesday my ADSL transfer finally went through, and I am now connected to Internode as my ISP. It's been a long time coming, but i'm pretty happy that i'm finally on Internode now that they have a DSLAM in my exchange. It's probably the most geek-respected ISP in the country, and it means that I finally have unmetered access to Steam downloads, a good gaming network as well as a heap of other stuff.

I'm currently on the 'Easy Naked' plan, which means that i'm paying $60/month for 70GB of quota. This is significant because it's the first time in the history of me using the internet that i'm paying less dollars than the gigabytes i have quota for per month.

After a few years of value-stagnation, recently it seems that broadband value-for-money in this country is finally improving. Even Telstra themselves have just announced pretty dramatic improvements to their BigPond plans, which of course has once again undercut the wholesale rates they charge to other providers. It pretty much looks like a big customer grab before they (hopefully) lose all their power when (hopefully) the National Broadband Network (NBN) starts to really kick in. Expect them in court again with the ACCC really soon.

Now that the election has been called, the NBN is a pretty important issue for geeks like me. Whilst I really support the program, combining it with the other Labor policies like compulsory internet filtering and mandatory ISP monitoring is just ludicrous. Then again, scrapping it altogether is also ludicrous. So both major sides of politics have pretty much lost my support over this topic.

So come election day, probably for the first time i won't be voting for either major political party. I'm not sure who i'm going to vote for at the moment; luckily my vote won't really make a difference in the lower-house (KRudd's almost an almost guaranteed winner here), but my Senate vote is going to be an interesting decision.