[wellylug] Broadband

[Tony Wills]

At 22:12 11/08/04 +1200, Jethro wrote:
>I've been looking and I thinking of either Paradise Cable, or Ihug
>Ultra.
>
>Can people on these either of plans please tell me how they have found
>it?

You want to know about paradise/telstra, I'll tell you about paradise/telstra!

I wonder about telstra/paradise cable installers, I know of four 
installations over the last 12 months, three of them had some delay caused 
by either mistyped data, mix-up of dates, or other problems that meant the 
installation didn't go ahead until a week after the original install date 
(I don't know if the 4th installation was on time).  Only one of the 
installers filled out the subnet-mask and gateway info on the scrap of 
paper they leave listing the ip address.

Up time's being pretty good, occasionally off air for a few hours, but last 
month on four successive days there was an outage for 4 to 6 hours.  First 
time I rang the helpful person denied there was any problem anywhere with 
the network.  She asked if I'd tried rebooting my computer, I explained no 
the problem was clearly (from the modem status lights) that there was no 
upstream connection, and anyway I was connected to the internet via a 
firewall/router and that wasn't getting any response either.  She then 
asked if I'd rebooted the router ... :-(
The next day the person was somewhat more helpful in that he acknowledged 
there might be a problem and they were working on it and asked for contact 
details so their techs could phone me ... I sort of got the impression that 
he was just humouring me (perhaps just too willing accept everything I 
said, without asking any questions ...) ... of course heard nothing and it 
sprang back into life many many hours later.

I get value for money, out of my 256k/10240 MB plan:
9566, 10130, 9664, 9756, 10195, 10253, 10120, 9567 (monthly usage)
But it was a real pain there for a while because the traffic statistics 
update would slow to a crawl and was at one stage 5 days behind (the bonus 
though was that occasionally it died altogether and I go a few free traffic 
days :-)  -- seems to be sort of fixed now.

But apart from that I'd say I was a satisfied customer :-)
(I was a long time customer of paradise dialup, it went down hill somewhat 
after telstra bought it.  I changed over to telstra phone & cable modem 
from telecom, it wasn't so much that telstra won me over, it was more a 
matter that telecom pissed me off one too many times)

The service is about what you expect from a utility provider - 
dispassionate service: you don't care about them so they don't care about you.