There are three types of accounts with Australink. The first and simplest is the PrePaid type account. This type of account allows a customer to purchase a fixed amount of Megabytes prior to using the service. Their data transfer depletes the amount of megabytes that they have in reserve during the time of their usage. It is up to the customer to keep track of the megabytes that they are using. For this purpose a Sessions report is available in the members area and a summary displays the quantity of Megabytes remaining on the first page of the members area. Once a users megabytes reaches 25mb or below they are automatically sent an email, warning them that they will need to top up their account if they would like to continue using the service. If the megabyte balance reaches 0mb the user is automatically deleted.
The Second Account type is a Pay As You Go account type. This type of account is billed in after the user has consumed a certain quantity of Megabytes and is billed monthly based on the amount of data transfer.
The Third Account type is a standard account type, each standard account is differentiated by the length of time available for each session (the length of time a user can spend online before being disconnected). These account types require that the user has a credit of 1 month in advance, so when they first sign up, the cost of the account is calculated to be twice its value, giving a payment for the current month and a payment for the following month. The second advancement is to prevent the user being automatically disconnected by the authentication server when dialing into the internet. This happens automatically because a user's balance has dropped to below zero dollars (AUD). The second month advance is a kind of buffer that needs to continuously be present until the final month of service used by the user. When you wish to discontinue your account, do not pay the bill and you will be deleted automatically (after a grace period), however, for those people who wish to continue using the account, payment of your invoices will ensure that you are not deleted from our system.
This set of pages explain How To Pay for your account, it gives an explanation of the Payment Methods available for your use, and guides you through the process of making three types of purchases the signup process for adsl, the signup process for dialup customers, an Account Top Up, and an Account Subscription.
The payment process is applicable for every payment method including cash and money order, as we need to keep track of the amount paid by cash in the same way that we keep track of amounts paid by electronic methods of payment. Although cash payments are not completed until you send confirmation that the payment has been made for example by faxing a receipt of payment from your bank. Please make sure you include your username and current contact details with this as we will not know who to credit the amount to without them.