I have finally done it. I have told Netspace where to shove their incompetence.
I am now a happy Exetel customer, with a sweet 8Mbit connection, with courtesy of Telstra, upload artifically capped for no believable technical reason to 384kbps.
We are approximately 2.5km from exchange, with a dB reading, which increased when changed to 8Mbit, but over 40dB, and this gave us speeds beyond the expected 7616, to a nice 8Mbit!
And Exetel’s plans are definitely worth it, they suffer the same as every other ISP in Australia, from International Backhaul issues, but they certainly have a great offering for consumers!
Excess usage is charged if we go over (not too likely), but the charges compare so much differently to Telstra’s $150/GB, with Exetel at $3/GB.
The only downside so far is the usage meter doesn’t seem to update often, but that’s OK. We have better things to do than watch our usage, and besides, with prices like Exetel’s you don’t need to monitor usage that closely!
Exetel aren’t an infrastructure innovation ISP, with no plans in sight of investing in their own ADSL2+ network, however, they are innovators of a different kind. They are price innovators.
The plans they have are very much close to market leading.
They cut back costs on the crap I don’t use anyway, which is Support.
With netspace, support has been the least used item on offer, for a few key reasons, but:
1. They are incompetent.
2. They are slow at responding to basic issues.
3. They are incompetent.
4. They don’t call back customers when promised.
5. They are incompetent.
6. The phone queue is very long.
7. They are incompetent.
8. They place unfair recontracting conditions on you as a user.
9. They are incompetent.
10. Did I say they were incompetent?
So, with those reasons at hand, and the fact they put prices up and gobbled profits rather than pass on a better deal for the consumer, and the big moving stuff up, and the 2 week delay in responding to a support enquiry (which was ONLY escalated as a result of posting on Whirlpool), the move to Exetel was pretty much a no brainer.
Netspace claim World Class Customer Service, well that’s misleading and missing a word anyway (world class = 3rd World, customer service = Incompetent Customer Service Reps).
Exetel have had some setbacks for them when they started shaping P2P data a while back, and publicly announced they were doing so.
Other ISPs (Like Westnet, who did the same and remained silent for 12 months) didn’t get a negative reaction as bad as Exetel did for publicly announcing it.
Exetel do plan to make a change to the issues affecting P2P for ISPs (it’s a common used transfer method for Linux ISOs), which is P2P caching, as this helps reduce costs on backhaul and instead can reissue data from a cache which assumably uses request packet matching technology to basically read the request packet, get a positive match, and serve the response locally from cache. This should work for all traffic but web and ftp which might be problems for caching, as sites like eBay depend on refresh working successfully.
The connection has been a great welcome to the network here, and should keep us happy for longer than the 6months we are signed for.
Enjoy!