We have to deal with them at the moment because we're staying with an elderly relative and her house, her rules - fair - and she is worried about switching providers. If something did go wrong and she lost her number, it would be pretty awful. So we're stuck with Telstra.

We're on our third modem with them in a little over a year (had to get a decent one, working from home). The absolute shit fight to get it replaced each time only served to reinforce that we are entirely correct on our views of their business. They have made it as tangled a web as Centrelink (another org that we have luckily not had to deal with in some time), and their customer service is basically non existent.

To their credit, their store staff did their best to help but their hands were so incredibly bound by red tape that there wasn't much to they could do. Also, the credit we were promised after the second go around was never applied to the account. Wasn't worth our time to chase it, because we actually value our time and have wasted enough of it.

And that's just one consumers experience.

The stuff they do on a national level is absolutely shameful. They need to be broken up.