[plug] adsl opinions

[Craig Ringer]

I'm a customer of both Westnet and iiNet, and have been a Telstra 
(*gag*) Cable customer in the past. Looking over this message having 
finished, I'm thinking "wow, that was quite a rant". Warning: I've been 
ripped off by Telstra and firmly believe that they're the cause of 90% 
of the problems with Australia's 'net services, being unethical and 
incompetent. Scum comes to mind. I also think I'm justified in that 
opinion and will happily explain if anybody cares to ask.

> WestNet have been excellent, modulo some firmware issues with dLink DSL-500's. 
> Have heard some whining, but mostly good. WestNet have their own statewide 
> data network so are very good for country.

WestNet's tech support is also very responsive - unlike iiNet's . You 
call, leave a message, and they ACTUALLY CALL YOU BACK. Usually, they 
find the right person to usefully answer the question and get _them_ to 
call you back, so more often than not a difficult or ongoing issue gets 
somebody with a functioning brain to look at it.\

However, in my experience they often need a lot of prodding to actually 
get moving on a complex or tricky problem. Said support is also not 24/7 
but rather ->10:00 weekdays and ->8:00 weekends :-(

WestNet's network hardware (eg proxies, DNS) hasn't given my any trouble 
at all  yet.

Oh, and I'm _still_ waiting for my new modem. 2 months or so of yo-yo 
service does not impress me.

> iiNet's service in general sucks. There are a few very bright individuals in 
> there (and they know who they are, so I won't name them :-) but you either 
> have to play tricks or spend some considerable time with an ex-waiter or both 
> in order to get to someone who knows what they're doing, and their ADSL 
> record in particular has been abysmal.

To be fair, the main problem I have with iiNet is not iiNet's fault - 
its them being stuffed around by Telstra at every opportunity. They're 
ususally helpful and act quickly, within limits imposed by Telstra. I 
just had my line at work upgraded from the old Layer 3 plans to layer-2 
pppoe-tunneled style. Telstra informed me, via iinet, that it would take 
2 hours to 3 days from commencement of work to complete, during which 
we'd be down, and they wouldn't call us and warn us first. In fact they 
wouldn't even tell us what WEEK they would do it in. When we went down 
without warning on Monday morning, we were back up after 2 1/2 hours and 
I thought "this isn't so bad" ... then we went down again yesterday at 
9:30 and stayed down. I got the service restored at about 12:00 after 
having our iiNet guy lodge a high-priority fault, and call them to 
explain about some "interesting" packet traces I'd provided to him. It 
looked a lot like they'd configured us to be denied access until the 
upgrade deadline completed... but that must've been by accident, right? 
*snort*.

WestNet suffers from Telstra too - stonewalling, poor response times, 
frequent network outages caused by Telstra frying exchange hardware, and 
  a fundamental lack of caring about levels of service.

Unfortunately, iiNet appear to usually hire newly lobotomized year-10 
dropouts for "level 1" tech support staff and don't give direct phone 
numbers to advanced (new, certified brain!) tech support. Of course I 
also sometimes get someone really useful in level 1 but usually I have 
to demand to see our corporate rep (for whom we don't have a direct 
number) to get useful information. This often takes some time as I have 
to sit on hold to get to a level 1 newbie, demand to see advanced tech, 
tell them that "yes, I've already checked that the bloody modem is 
plugged in" , etc.

I've also found iiNet to have issues with their mail servers and proxies 
too often for my liking. Not actually all that often, and never in my 
experience resulting in hard downtime, but it can be very annoying. For 
example, for a while 1 in 3 messages coming to us lacked an 
X-Envelope-To header 'cos they'd added a new qmail box to the mail 
cluseter and misconfigured it. It took me 3 days to convince them that 
something had, in fact, changed, since they insisted that nothing had 
been changed. No, just added a new mail server, no changes. *arrggh*. We 
do domain-pop and we _need_ that header for proper mail delivery.

> I have one customer with several ADSL lines who relies on them for service to 
> a Terminal Server box (which I call `the basket') running his primary app, 
> and iiNet cause him an issue at least monthly, some issues have had one or 
> all locations off air for half a day and one had a remote location down for 
> two full days. Said customer is migrating to WestNet as his contracts expire.

Hmm. I've had similar issues but every time my iiNet account has gone 
down, so has my Westnet one at home according to my housemates, and its 
usually a Telstra exchange problem.



So in my opinion what it really comes down to is:
- supplied DSL hardware (avoid the DSL-300 and preferably D-Link it 
appears. Maybe buy your own?)
- any contract term (market changes too often, and all the contracts 
have a "we can change this contract any time we feel like it" clause)
- quality of tech support
- service offerings (price, data rate, data allowance, etc)
- reliability of higher-level network gear like ISP's proxies and DNS 
servers.

After all they're all basically reselling telstra's service and will be 
equally awful 'till Telstra can be properly stomped on once and for all. 
Hopefully by UtiliTel.

-- 
Craig Ringer
GPG Key Fingerprint: AF1C ABFE 7E64 E9C8 FC27  C16E D3CE CDC0 0E93 380D
	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
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