[plug] [OT] iiNet, ADSL, & Westnet

[Richard Henry]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 04:02:33PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
...
> I'm going to be signing up with ArachNet for my new home DSL service 
> (I've just moved), unless anyone has any great big warning signs to 
> throw my way. For all I know, I may end up back with WN in no short 
> order, but we'll see.

I guess it depends what you are after.

When I first decided to get ADSL (about 4 months ago when I moved house)
I couldn't decide between iiNet, Westnet or Arachnet, so I sent each an
email (at the same time) with some technical questions I wanted answered
anyway.

I send the email at about 1am Sunday morning.  By 9:30am Sunday Westnet
had responded.  iiNet responded on *Thursday*, and Arachnet never
responded.  Guess who I went with?

Another thing I liked is that Telstra ended up doing the physical ADSL
connection on a day I was at work till 9:30pm.  I come home, see line
sync on my modem.  Jumped on the net through my old dialup account,
started a real-time chat with Westnet support from their webpage.  They
gave me a test account to check my DSL was really active and then, when
it worked, activated my account.  I was online with my own DSL account
by 10:30pm.  I *like* that sort of service.

Also, I'm a big kid that never grew up properly so I game a bit online.
Arachnet customers are continually cursing the consistency at which
their pings jump up to around 250ms for days at a time, while the rest
of us are at 40ms.  That being said, its usually only gamers that even
notice the difference between a 30ms and 250ms response from a server
so...

I havent seen much difference in connection probs between iiNet and
Westnet.

My 2c.

Rich.