Nathan Waters

I’m not sure if I’ve written about this on the blog before, but it’s something which has been plaguing me in terms of putting a large dent in my funds, and a larger dent in my online business activities due to unproductive Internet speeds.

Who’s the culprit? … Chariot NetConnect: www.chariot.net.au

(eek, just writing the name makes my blood pressure rise)

The Story

The story begins when moving up here to uni. As you can probably guess, being an online browsing/business/technology junkie means that I tend to be quite a heavy Net user especially with the recent emergence of podcasts, vidcast and all sorts of knowledge-juicy media.

Back home (Moruya), we were on a 512kbps connection with a download cap of 20GB and paying $50 a month. That bandwidth would be maxed out for most of the day as I downloaded and browsed, while my little brother played Warcraft3 24/7 (sad I know :)). It was also quite easy for me to go over that 20GB cap in a month and be shaped back down to 64kbps.

Uni begins…

Either I or my mum decided that it would probably be better for me to live on campus at least for the first year, so that I’ll meet a lot of people and make some good friends, which I know I have done more-so than a few people I know who live off-campus. So I moved up here and settled into Campus East (located in Fairy Meadow, about a 20min bike ride from the actual Uni).

It’s not too shabby here, there’s about 500+ people so it’s always lively. There’s 2 big screen TV areas, a gym, a couple of big open soccer and footy fields, a big dining room, and is about a 3min walk to the beach… Although I must admit that the beaches up here are about a 1/10 when you compare them to any beaches down south.

Where it completely sucks is in the prices.

I’m in catered, so that’s 19 meals a week. I think catered is the better option as otherwise I think I either wouldn’t eat or I’d end up eating complete junk food. The only problem is that it costs $200 a week. If I shared a house/apartment with a few people I could probably get through the week on around half of that. But otherwise considering I don’t have to cook, buy food, washup, clean my room, pay for water or electricity etc, it’s alright.

However, Internet access at UOW is completely primitive. To be able to use the ethernet port in my room to access the Net I am charged $14 a week!

Now since my computer was smouldering for the first two weeks of Uni, I was using the computer lab here to check emails etc using my Uni Quota. The Quota they give you is 100MB of download over 6 whole months! The thing is that it’s quite easy to “download” 100MB of data in a day while just surfing websites. So before 0-week had finished I’d used all that quota. Woohoo, I now can’t access any external sites at Uni. I tried to get more quota was denied… maybe they don’t like me browsing the YE forums

So when I’d managed to fix my computer and I’d run out of quota, the campus offers only one option for me to get net access from my room… through a company called Chariot (dead-company-walking!). I’ve since found out that every single UOW campus have this same setup and only have the one ISP to choose from.

What are the prices you ask?

Don’t look at the prices on Chariot’s website, they charge totally different prices for students.

You should make sure you’re sitting down to read this…

Plans Available to Students:

- $1 per hour
- $25 for 500MB (once off, NOT per month, if it runs out you have to buy more)
- something in between (can’t find the price sheet currently)
- $132 for 4GB (same as above and is the maximum download limit available)

Connection Speed:

- 256kbps… the slowest ADSL broadband speed possible in Australia

“OMFG WTFH FBS!”

Yep.

Why not go wireless then? … Well I looked into that and there are only a few providers available in the area. I believe Telstra is the only one available currently, but if you checkout their prices they’re actually worse! Another company is Fish Telecom, whos prices are a lot better, but I would need to fix an antenna on the roof and run a cable out my window and up the wall for it to work. The likeliness of that being allowed is pretty slim.

So I decided since I often hit the 20GB per month mark, a download option would end up costing me around $660 a month. Hmm, I think I’ll go the $1 per hour system.

That ended up being a bad move. Since not only do I tend to download a lot, but I also spend a lot of hours on the Net. I’ve since decided I have to stop downloading things like Diggnation and transferred over to the 4GB option.

Fast forward 3 months and I’ve forked out around $600 for Internet access. That’s around $200 a month. Imagine what kind of plan I could have got for that amount!

The Action

Now I’m not the stereotypical student who protests about everything and anything, but you’ve got to agree with me that this is a monopoly.

So I’ve been complaining to the max.

I’ve contacted the head of Campus East, but he wasn’t terribly helpful and basically said to fill out this survey of the accommodation services (the same one I’m sure they’ve been running for the last couple of years). I’ve also contacted the Uni and the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).

And to top it off last Friday I had a meeting with an IT staff and accommodation services staff at Uni. Well that was very interesting and I sense many shady deals and contracts in the background here which I plan to get to the bottom of.

To cut the meeting short, they basically pulled out some abusive (definitely not threatening) emails I’d sent to Chariot after their replies to previous emails I’d sent were frustrating. Funnily enough in one of the emails I mentioned that hopefully they enjoy the ACCC knocking on their door. So I believe Chariot must have shat themselves and then forwarded (is this a breech of privacy?) the emails to the Head IT Support Guy to “sort me out” I presume… So they are basically trying to blackmail me.

Rather than kickup a protest, they’d prefer me to keep it quiet and go through the “appropriate channels” which I am yet to be told about… who else do I need to complain to?!

I mentioned I could quite easily setup a petition/survey and have on-campus students voice their opinions, but that was quickly shut-down with comments like “petitions do very little” and “you don’t want to be known as that kid from campus who kicked up a fuss about everything”. Hmm, I don’t really care… I’m still going to setup a petition.

I’ve also setup a thread on the Whirlpool Forums and through there I got into contact with a guy who runs Fish Telecom (who also do wireless). He was saying that they’ve been trying to lobby to be able to compete with Chariot in the campuses for a few years now. So obviously there must be some kind of ridiculous contract in place between Chariot and UOW and some big kickbacks in place for the Uni.

Very shady, very dodgy… but I’ll get to the bottom of it.

Nathan Waters
Net Activist?