iiNet has shut down its Sydney office and most of the staff have been made redundant. The Internet service provider (ISP) was acquired by TPG over a year ago. Here are the details.
iiNet moved its Sydney operation from its swanky new office on Market Street in the CBD to a smaller premises on George Street nearby.
Lifehacker Australia understands that there were around 30 employees at the George Street office. Most iiNet staff have accepted voluntary redundancy, after only a handful of roles at TPG were offered to the remaining employees
We also understand that the Sydney team had been gradually shrinking over the past year as a large portion of customer-facing roles were off-shored to South Africa. Recently, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) released figures showing customer complaints against iiNet had skyrocketed in the past year.
iiNet was founded in 1993 in Perth by Michael Malone and Michael O’Reilly. Malone, who left his post as iiNet managing director shortly after the acquisition, joined the board of NBN Co earlier this year.
TPG was contacted for comment but did not get back to us at the time of publication.
Stay tuned for more developments on this story.
This article originally appeared on Lifehacker Australia
Comments
29 responses to “iiNet Shuts Down Sydney Office”
Moved to MyRepublic because iinet have shit me to tears for the last 18 months. Had issues with my service for weeks and got treated like a moron for three weeks longer until they accepted that I was correct and the problem was routing on their end.
Switch took longer than I’d hoped but the service has been decent, local and timely with updates. The connection itself is great, same speeds as iinet nbn for $40 less per month.
Anyway this isn’t meant to be a MyRepublic ad, just fuck iinet is all.
I might be following you; my last call to customer service with iiNet made me wanna set fire to what remained of the company.
Not because the customer service has been off-shored (the guy on the phone really was trying his best) but because they have made it impossible for the staff to find out what is going on!
I was calling up because after six hours (no joke!) I still didn’t have my Internet back one day. After about 12 hours all up it finally came back. But the fact the poor guy couldn’t even get any details on what was going on I’m seriously bailing.
Otherwise, iiNet has been good to me even when things have gone wrong but once they were bought out that all changed.
Was the delay in getting the switch caused by MyRepublic or elsewhere? Just wondering as I’ll most likely be going for them when I move and I don’t want them to be another Dodo (cheap but awful) 🙂
I can’t answer this for sure. It could be that NBN Co. have ten staff now thanks to Turnbull and the requests were taking ages. Could be that MyRepublic launched the day I got it and shit went wrong. In either case new service is great, they were good to deal with on the phone and they charge me $40 less per month.
Do you have an NBN box in your house? Just get them to set up your service on port 2 (assuming iinet is port 1) and then turn off iinet once it’s active.
I knew this would happen as soon as TPG took over. TPG’s customer service was shit … Now iinet
IiNet service used to have great customer service and now it is nonexistent.
I’ve had great experiences with their support several times over the last month.
See I used to get excellent service. Friendly helpful people that went out of their way to help you. You used to be able to ring up and get someone within 2 minutes. The last time I had to ring the queue time was 5 hours. Like seriously?
Now when something goes wrong… I just wait it out.
That interesting because I’ve had to call a few times over the last month(moved house) and the longest I waited to speak to someone was 20 minutes. And then I got a call from them the next day(same guy) to make sure everything is working fine.
I remember getting this service in the past, but when they were setting up the service (which they fucked up and blamed me despite the agent typing in an address in a completely different suburb for the service) and then when my routing was broken and they blamed me all I got was condescending saffers and 15 hours of phone calls saying the same thing over and over. They only made an attempt to fix it when I went on facebook and started posting to their page and even then they just shut me up and forgot about it again until I returned having not received a call in 48 hours.
Just to clarify I moved house and had been with them for 7 years.
Hah! I’ve been with them about just as long and have just moved house as well!
I don’t know what to say, maybe I just got lucky or you just got unlucky.
They did the same thing when they took over AAPT. They made a lot of staff redundant, imposed ridiculous changes (3 signatures required to purchase a $5 patch lead) to the point that a lot more staff left voluntarily, provided worse service, and in the end they ran it in to the ground..
I assume you’re talking about AAPT Corporate?
Because iiNet got the AAPT consumer arm.
It was only a matter of time until TPG started closing things up.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never had a problem with TPG’s call centre, and it’s doubtful I could get better speeds from another provider given my distance from the nearest exchange.
the world of routes might say otherwise
Back in the day when I had an iiNet connection (roughly 10 years ago) it would route through the authentication servers in Perth before heading to the rest of the world.
NSW > Perth > NSW > America
yeah, they still do dumb shit like that now.
The reason I say I doubt I would get better speeds is because I’m literally at the end of the range for the exchange.
On the bright side, the iiNet shareholders got a good price from the merger.
It took them long enough to start gutting the company. So glad I’m not with them (employed or a customer) anymore.
I’m hearing you on both accounts! Was very different a number of years ago. Sad to see the collapse really.
not surprising in the least, service from internode is also suffering. Would also likely go to myrepublic if I didn’t want to keep my email.
If you’re using an email address tied to an ISP, you’re best off taking the plunge and switching to an address you control. Make the change when you don’t have to rather than have it affect your judgement if you need to switch in future.
A lot of ISPs will let you cancel your internet account but keep your email account for about a $25 annual fee.
Ouch. I left Australia about two years ago, and didn’t hear about iiNet being bought out. Damn shame. I swapped from TPG for iiNet and was impressed that they’d actually hear me out and fix my problem instead of following a damn script.
Yay, giant corporate mergers condensing the number of private sector jobs as usual…
All for the shareholders. Lucky them. Too bad shares will continue to slide when business goes in the toilet.
Have they done the same to internode? Last time I lodged a fault the service was still good.