whining about broadband...
…in this country is pretty much passé these days. Everyone’s got horror stories. The monopoly incumbent wholesales frankly unacceptably crap to everyone else, and the alternatives either aren’t widely available or have compromises of their own.
It’s all a bit rubbish, actually.
Recently I got a chirpy email from my ISP. It was good news apparently – I was to be transferred onto a new plan, for the same price, but with a new “as fast as you can go” speed maxing out at the somewhat less that overwhelming maximum speed of 8 Mbps. There were a couple of other compromises as well, like not downloading more than 2 GB in a day.
Gee thanks.
The laugh of the matter (I thought) was that although nominally I was on a 2 Mbps connection, I’d NEVER managed to get it to go faster than 1.5 Mbps ever, even in the very early morning hours of the assassin when sensible people are sleeping and competing usage should be at a minimum. So I knew that despite the chirpy ISP email, I’d see SFA difference.
It turns out the last laugh is on me. There is a difference. It feels slower and less responsive now; and web pages often get “stuck”, not displaying but spinning away. Testing it a bit, I’m finding that although the download speed may now sometimes get as high as 1.3 Mbps in the early morning, when I actually want to use it – evenings and weekends – it is disgracefully slow. As I write this, at about 9:20 in the evening, it’s down to 0.5 Mbps! And the upload speed is now almost never more than 0.08 Mbps.
Pathetic.
I’d rant more if the situation didn’t leave me with the sort of weariness tinged with anger and disgust that makes me feel that further thinking about the subject is a futile exercise.
Mr Reasonable
4 March 2008, 20:45 #
Yeah, I fell for it too if you’re with the same Vodafone owned group as me. My old 2mbs plan had significantly faster speeds than the “as fast as your line will go” bollox that I now have. Into my fist month and all peak time traffic is sluggish.
Alan
4 March 2008, 21:39 #
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I was a bit worried it was only my imagination.
I’m costing up TelstraClear and their phone/cable broadband combos. Their tolls are now better than those forced upon me by my current ISP, too.
Maybe time for another change.
Jessie
4 March 2008, 21:59 #
Sounds not unlike my ongoing hair-tearing when it comes to paypal.
PatrickQG
5 March 2008, 00:05 #
The UK suffers a similar problem – almost all the ADSL broadband sold is just ISPs selling BT’s stuff. And BT charges those ISPs per GB of traffic trunked from the user back to the ISP. I’m told they charge more per GB than that GB will then cost to go from the ISP to the final destination. Highway robbery in other words.
Of course, there are some ISPs with their own DSLAMs, not sure who though. Also Virgin do cable, that as long as you’re not bittorrenting (and when you do it sends the latency on the line to hell, but this doesn’t seem to hurt the torrenting at all) is pretty darn good. Virgin also manage to sell all their cable products as “unlimited”, without a “fair use of XGB/month” clause.
che tibby
5 March 2008, 06:04 #
don’t feel like you’re out on a limb. i despise IHUG after a horrific few months with them.
they’re still hassling me for a $2.80 overcharge on my account.
i’m taking this one to the supreme court.
which is a tragedy. they were the saviour of the internet in the 90s.
Alan
5 March 2008, 06:14 #
Jessie: PayPal. I’ve not had problems with them… well not since 2001 anyway… but I’ve heard about plenty who have. At least you haven’t lost any money…
Patrick: I wonder when ISPs here will start installing their own infrastructure. And if they did, would it actually be much of a useful improvement, given the competitive pressures are so weak?
Che: I don’t hate Ihug… I find it hard to blame them for all of this situation. But then I never use their customer service, and haven’t thus far had any billing issues…
drinks-after-worker
5 March 2008, 09:52 #
Alan, how do those speeds xlate into Kb/s? I can’t figure it out…
Alan
5 March 2008, 12:12 #
It’s megabits per second and kilobits per second in the traffic speed sense – i.e., 1000 kilobits to the megabit.
Let’s not get started on kibibits and megabytes, though eh?
Stephen
6 March 2008, 09:19 #
For what it’s worth, I am moderately pleased with TelstraClear now.
They appear to have hired a lot more help desk staff in recent months, so I typically get a technician with no wait time (whereas a year ago I could wait for an hour). They have a horrible voice recognition like Telecom do though…
Service here in Hataitai has also improved – haven’t had an outage for a long time.
I generally seem to get all the bandwidth I’m paying for too. Good upload speed is marvellous when you’re putting things on Flicker or updating your website.
Alan
6 March 2008, 09:40 #
Yes, it’s the upload speed I’m keen on too. I’ve swung around to your view of two years ago.
James
15 March 2008, 04:14 #
Hi,
What is your connect rate at ihug? Not the speed test rates you are getting.
But the physical connect rate that the router is getting
Alan
16 March 2008, 08:56 #
It’s supposed to be an “up to 8 megabit per second” connection, if that’s what you mean.