I've been using Internode as our home ISP for quite a long time. I'm struggling to find when we first signed up with them, but extrapolating back from the last invoice I can find, it might be around 2002/2003? That's probably when I upgraded from my work dial-up to ADSL1.

They were the first ISP in Australia to offer ADSL2+, and we upgraded in 2006.

Internode introduced IPv6, which I wrote about in 2010.

In 2012 I shifted to 'Naked ADSL' and migrated our home phone number to VoIP.

In 2017 the first NBN (National Broadband Network) rollout in our neighbourhood meant I could upgrade to Fibre To The Node (FTTN). Frustratingly, this was originally planned to be full Fibre To The Premises (FTTP), but a change of government meant going for a cheaper (and short-sighted in my opinion) option. Unfortunately for me, our house was on the end of a long copper run from our nearest 'Node', so the best speed we'd ever achieve would be ~45Mbps.

Finally, 7 years later the NBN has provisioned FTTP in our suburb. You need to register with your ISP to request a (free) upgrade from the existing copper and get the fibre from the street into your house (and termination equipment installed).

After the NBN was rolled out in Australia, there was a period of consolidation among ISPs. In 2011 Internode was bought by iiNet, which in turn was acquired by TPG Telecom in 2015.

For the most part, things just kept working, though there were some signs of change. The rare time I needed to call support, they now appeared to be offshore rather than Adelaide-based. Last year they dropped support for hosted email and then stopped accepting new customers under the Internode brand. I suspect it won't be long before it's gone completely.

So rather than just move by default to iiNet (which I believe is what would happen if I requested FTTP through Internode), I thought this was a good opportunity to check out what other providers were in the market.

And so after some research and reading comments and reviews on the Whirlpool forums, I settled on a newer ISP called Leaptel.

There were a couple of things that interested me about Leaptel. For one, their prices were competitive, but secondly, their CEO Matt hangs out in the Whirlpool forum and is really responsive to questions from other posters. In many ways, it is quite reminiscent of that other ISP that I signed up for all those years ago.

So step one, I've switched to Leaptel as our FTTN provider. But as part of the sign-up process, I also requested they initiate the upgrade to FTTP.

I was a bit unsure how the fibre would be installed to our house (given my observation of where our copper line comes in), so I thought it would be wise to wait until a neighbour or two had gone through the process first. That happened in the last couple of weeks, and interestingly the NBN folks ended up spending quite a few days in our street sorting out issues with tree roots, as well as having to negotiate how to run the new fibre to their houses.

In one case they wanted to dig up a neighbour's brand new concrete driveway. Not surprisingly, that neighbour said no, so they ended up running it alongside the driveway (which honestly seems like a simpler option anyway!)

I've now been notified that the NBN techs are due to come this Friday to start our upgrade. There's a few things I'll be interested to find out:

  • Can they reuse the existing copper conduit to pull the fibre to our house? If they can't, then will they be digging up my front garden and/or the concrete path we have around our house?
  • Can they install the 'NBN connection box' in our storeroom (where I have our current modem and networking gear)? It is right at the back of our house, so there is a risk it could be too far from the 'NBN utility box' that they apparently put on an external wall of your house.

I should have some answers to those questions soon.