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It started as a pun on the name of Telstra's cable service, BigPond. It soon expanded to cover Optus cable, ADSL, and other forms of broadband in Australia as they became available.
It now serves as a de facto industry watchdog for the larger players in the Australian broadband industry, such as Telstra and Optus.
Its sister site, Broadband Choice, is the most comprehensive list of broadband options, plans and prices in Australia.
One of Whirlpool's most noted features is that the entire site is hand-coded by Simon Wright, and it has its own custom forum engine. The forums are well known for being fully-featured, yet fast, efficient, and not bloated. The forums are generally a popular place to ask broadband related questions - representatives from many Australian broadband ISPs actively support their current and prospective users through this channel, though they do stress that it is an unofficial support method.
The moderators are often accused for being heavy handed when it comes to some issues. However, when threads and posts are deleted or moved, placeholders are left so users can see the moderation has taken place. This is different to other forum software, where deleted threads just disappear from view, and posts can be edited by moderators unknown to users. As a result, the forum appears to be more heavily moderated than others, but it only appears this way because much of the moderation is visible.
The forum also has very few off-topic areas (known as 'lounges'). It also does not support signatures, avatarIn Hinduism, an Avatar is defined as the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of an Immortal Being, or of the Ultimate Being In Hacker culture: Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an avatar is an icon or representation of a uss or in-line images. Many of the long term users agree that such differences are certainly beneficial to the forum, and set it apart from "pre-written" forum software.