Unusually for me, since I'm obviously a glass-half-full person, I'm going to grump here.

Over the last 6 weeks or so our broadband performance has started to suffer in peak hours. Off-peak it's fine - the line itself gets full-speed link up and down for DSL1 - and we get about 6.5Mb down and 760kb up. But starting around 8pm it plummets; the worst I recorded was 0.02Mb down and 0.05Mb up. Yes: literally slower downlink than dialup. Typically it drops to about 1.2Mb down without affecting uplink.

After a two week marathon of back and forth with Telecom retail and then Chorus, it has been admitted that the exchange could use a backhaul upgrade (although it is denied that the the backhaul is congested). However, and here comes the grump - nothing will be done until 2016 but in the meantime perhaps another service would be of more benefit to me.

No, another service will not be of more benefit to me, since we use the internet during peak hours to watch streaming TV. A mobile data service with a higher cost for lower data cap and more variable performance will not be especially useful for watching TV.

This is doubly annoying because I had inquired a while back as to whether or not the cabinet would ever be upgraded to ADSL 2/2+ (since I am easily close enough to benefit from such an upgrade) and was told that in the same timeframe as above I would be 'upgraded' to RBI 5Mbps - i.e., upgraded to a service that will be more expensive, with a smaller data cap, and worse performance than I was already getting.

So there you go, rant over - I'm not happy but the people that can do something about it don't officially care, and all my alternatives are worse than the current one.