I’ve kept my BigPond WBB service for when I or my family go travelling. I’d still rate it as the overall supretior quality service. But when my parents get back from being ‘grey nomads’ I’ll be dropping the BigPond plan back to the cheapest option on the rate card.

Re: the roaming thing with 3. If you have the new slimmer USB modem (which they market as the ‘internet key’) I think the default configuraiton is for it not to roam onto 2G, so if you want it to roam you have to go into the configuration manager and change from ‘3G only’ to ‘3G preferred’. I guess they wised up and got sick of dealing with all the customer complaints about massive roaming charges even when in the city.