[LINK] Do Telstra require MS Windows for broadband?

[Carl Makin]

Hi David,

David Lochrin wrote:

>   A social acquaintance who runs Linux told me -
>  
>
>>Until I signed up to broadband Internet I did not even have Microsoft installed on my PC, but Telstra would not install Bigpond without it.
>>    
>>
>
>   Has any Linker had this experience?  Surely such behaviour would warrant attention from the ACCC?
>  
>
If you do a self-install then you can run anything but Bigpond ADSL will 
only send a tech out to do the install for you if you have Windows, or 
grudgingly, a Mac (and the guy I had about 3 years ago knew nothing 
about MacOS X and only had instructions for MacOS 9, I would hope that 
has changed by now).

If you ring up for support and arn't running Windows then you'll find 
they will immediately tell you that they only support windows but first 
you should reinstall your software and reboot your machine.  Call center 
monkeys really.  If you persist you can get through to a level 2 support 
person to whom you can say things like "I'm seeing a return from the 
Deakin exchange but authentication is failing" and not get a blank 
response.  Not that it will help.

When I first got Bigpond broadband I ended up booting the PC into Win98, 
letting the tech do his thing and then transferring the details over to 
my FreeBSD firewall after he had gone.  Much easier.

I'm with Netspace now, much better.

Carl.