In the beginning of the year I signed up for ADSL2+ for our home. ADSL2+ can theoretically give us 20Mbit download and 1Mbit upload. Up till now we have been using dialup, which is a bit painful.

We got a phone call yesterday telling us that they had finally set-up the telephone exchange to handle ADSL2+ and we could go down and pick-up the modem when we are ready to. I am thinking about doing that before lunch today, but it may need to wait until tomorrow.

We went with a company called Regional Internet Australia, or RAWNET. The have wireless and ADSL2+ packages, both of which are being sold by quite a few re-sellers around Townsville at the moment. The broadband Internet packages have no contract and comes with a free wireless router. The no contract thing could be good because we can leave at any time, but it could also make it real easy for them to up the costs and change the contract if they want to.

The broadband package that we got was only $25.00 per month for 5GB downloads, which is way cheaper than most of the other options available here. We worked it out and we think that it may even be cheaper than dial-up because we have to pay $0.15 for local phone calls here in Australia. If we find that we are needing more than 5GB we can also upgrade to the 20GB package for only an extra $10.00 or so per month.

Now all I need to do is get my deck set-up so that I can sit out their with my laptop and enjoy the speed with wireless. Of course, I’ll also need a laptop that has more than 5-minutes battery life, but that’s another story…