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.

NOTE: 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. 10GB 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 5GB and 15GB now.

Maxnet

Currently follow a similar model to other ISPs -- 12GB 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 10GB cap but they charge a national meg at 100k; ie you could do 50GB of national traffic and 5GB of international traffic on your 10GB cap.

(I'd be impressed if you did 55GB 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. 10GB international/month, national is not charged. At all. Makes downloading LinuxDistributions 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

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...