View Source: IspFlames - Waikato Linux Users Group

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This page is for flaming your current [ISP], explaining how much they suck and why you should change.  Alternatively, if you've found an [ISP] that doesn't suck, then be sure to let us all know.  To any [ISP] owners around, please don't take anything on this page as offense, just venting. :)

Discuss your [ISP] here, and ''please sign your messages''!

World Exchange:
  Have one of the better deals around IMHO, phone (VoIP) and internet (Full speed both ways ADSL2) for $69 a month + $1 per Gig traffic.
  Pluses:
    VoIP includes all the features that other phone providers charge extra for. lets you redirect voicemail to email, block anonymous calls, etc.
    They automatically drop calls with invalid ANI, no more Australian Holiday Scams from "0000"
  Minuses:
    International bandwidth is very bad at the moment, almost unusable once all the "90G free" leeches get on at night. It wasn't so bad last year though and hopefully they'll sort out a better connection soon.

Vodafone:

  Wankers.

  When I signed up with ihug, well over a year ago (June 2007?) I specifically asked not to be on any kind of contract, which meant not accepting the free modem, free broadband, or whatever they were offering at the time. I can't remember what it was, but I discussed at great length that I wanted to be able to cancel and switch to another provider at any time, with no early termination fee. And they agreed that by refusing the free goodies and paying full price for everything, that's what I would get.

  In October this year, I switched to World Exchange. Broadband was working on the 24th, and my phone transferred on the 31st, which meant that at sometime in there (before November) Vodafone would have been told that I was no longer their customer. But just to be sure of it, I phoned them after the weekend.

  And then they billed me for November (All of it, $105) anyhow, despite knowing full well that they had not provided my phone or broadband for one second of one day of any time in November. And when I complained, they refunded November and billed me a $199 'early termination fee' instead, despite my customer notes showing that I had both forgone all the 'goodies' and been a customer for more than 12 months.

  Total wankers. I've just got off the phone from trying to sort all this out and I am still really, fantastically pissed off.

------

!! Old entries

All of these entries are at least 3 years old. Take with a grain of salt.

WorldNet:
    Good [ISP], a bit of packet loss internationally, no helpdesk, but if your accounts going fine you should never have to talk to them.  Havent had any issues.  10[GB] international cap.. speed average.. 13k/sec normally.. but at times slower. have a habit of mentioning every scheduled telecom outage on their webpage, but hard to find out till you read them all where they are.  similar to orcon.  but peer to peer seems to work ok i guess (as good as peer to peer works). However all [ADSL] has dropped in performance, you never get the 16k/sec constant like you used to.


[Orcon]:
    Great li'l [ISP]. Traffic used to be uncapped, which meant their int'l bandwidth was permanently saturated, but it's is capped at 5[GB] and 15[GB] now.


__Maxnet__:
    Currently follow a similar model to other [ISP]s -- 12[GB] int'l traffic (calculated off both upload and download) and unlimited national traffic. They offer "internet filtering". Bought out Web Internet (who rocked [IMHO]), and therefore all their hapless users without so much as a by-your-leave.


__Net4U__:
    Actually, I quite like these guys. ;-)

    Bah.. I've had days when I can't stay connected for more than two minutes at a time, times when I'm still connected but can't even ping the [PPP] peer, news-server weirdness (a bunch of the binaries newsgroups have suddenly gone from 800 msgs a day to 150, and 2/3 of those are missing messages! Argh!)

    [OTOH] they're cheap. I guess I can live with it :)

    These guys have since gone under and they closed down.


[Xtra]:
    [DNS](?) or [Proxy](?) stops responding sometimes.

    Carrier dropped randomly (usually sooner rather than later and only on first connect attempt -- weird).

    [Xtra] were ''shockingly bad'' considering how expensive they are; I had frequent problems with their opaque-proxying, sites I could resolve and ping, but couldn't get to on port 80 because [Xtra]'s [Proxy] couldn't resolve them. Also they told me on the phone no signup fee and I had to argue to get it refunded.

    [Xtra] disconnects you ''very'' frequently (every few minutes) when using Gnutella.


__Paradise__:
    Not bad at all.  Usually pretty fast, and $20 for 250 hours isn't such a bad deal.  For JetStart, they offer a 10[GB] cap but they charge a national meg at 100k; ie you could do 50[GB] of national traffic and 5[GB] of international traffic on your 10[GB] cap.

    (I'd be impressed if you did 55[GB] on JetStart in a month!)


__ihug__:
    I liked them on dialup -- very stable, and while not as cheap as paradise ($24.95/month for 250 hours, or $29.95/month for unlimited, including $5 of ihug phone calls), have always found them good. On JetStart I find them even better. 10[GB] international/month, national is not charged. At all. Makes downloading LinuxDistribution~s that much more fun.


TelstraClear's [Tempest]:
    Pity that they are only interested in Business Customers, and even if you are a Business, then you need to be smack bang right in the middle of the [CBD] for them to even consider you. :(

    On the other hand on their cheap deal you *do* get 32kBps almost constantly :)

    It would be such a good business direction for TelstraClear to offer [Tempest] to residential customers, they would make alot of money from it and we'd be happier too!

    The problem is that they'd have to spend a lot of money ripping up roads to lay cables out there :(

    Cable would be nice here in Hammy, but it's not happening any time soon.


__ClearNet Tempest 2MB__ (wireless):
    Not as good as the DSL service, as we seem to have a constant ping of between 149 to 400ms, never lower. =(

    On our [DSL] Tempest256 with a Alcatel router we get pings of 12-14ms to the same host.

    Ahh, never get wireless internet connections :)


[Satlan | http://www.satlan.com]:
    Pretty good. 128K connection, static IP, cheap price.  Usually low ping (50-150ms to NZ servers).  I've actually found that wireless is usually <10ms ping, it's the routers at the other end which soak up the time...
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Last edited on Monday, December 15, 2008 3:19:07 pm by BruceKingsbury
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