[netspeed on] TransACT network

[Adam]

If they have retained your credit card details and use them without your
permission a good way to stop them is to contact your bank and get them to do
a chargeback on the transaction.  The offending party will be contacted by the
bank and told it has lost the money and will get in trouble if it happens too
often.  Plus there will be lots of paperwork if they want to get their
accounts to tally.

Adam.

andrew at bishop.dropbear.id.au wrote:

> Since I'm bagging netspeed out so much in this message, I'm CCing it to
> netspeed to allow them to respond.  Who knows, maybe this will convince
> them to address my complaints?
>
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, John Griffiths wrote:
>
> > Well I've gotta say my friends and I are having trouble getting what we
> > want from netspeed (ports 25 & 80 blocked) intermittent connection to
> > port 22 (it'll drop out midway thought a session)
>
> I can assure you that neither port 25 not port 80 are blocked, at least
> for me.  If they tried that, I would be having more than a few words to
> them...
> That could be because I signed up for a business plan.
>
> At least, they don't block those ports inbound (I run both sendmail and
> apache, and both are globally accessable).  Port 80 outbound is blocked -
> or rather, redirected through their "transparent" proxy.
>
> > it seems pretty rocksolid for outbound websurfing which i guess is
> > where they're aiming
>
> Not from what I've seen.
>
> My complaints about netspeed are:
>
> 1) I specifically requested a permanent IP when I signed up.  They only
> changed it on me once.  Ok, I could forgive that if they'd told me it
> would be happening, but they just did it, then waited for me to ring and
> find out what was going on.
>
> Also, despite my repeated phone calls, they still haven't set up the
> reverse DNS for the IP they gave me.  That's right,
> 167.186.56.203.in-addr.arpa does not resolve *at all* (nxdomain).  So
> assorted mail servers refuse to talk to me.  I have managed to convince
> them that this is their problem (yes, I handle my own domain, but the
> in-addr.arpa domain for my ip isn't delegated to me, it's delegated to
> you), and even had them promise to fix it "this afternoon" a couple of
> times.  Still no change visible, 3 months on.
>
> 2) their DNS is flakey.  I initially set up my dns server to forward
> requests to theirs, but after a couple of days of only being able to
> resolve some things half the time, I gave up on that.  Never failed to
> resolve (for example) yahoo.com, but when I try to resolve <some random
> small server I and maybe 3 other people outside china use regularly>,
> half the time I get NXDOMAINs.
>
> 3) the link itself is flakey.  It may be available 97% of the time, but
> the downtimes are periods of maybe a minute or so, spaced randomly. This
> is exacerbated by the fact that I'm forced to run my own dns (and don't
> know enough about configuring bind, probably).  If I try to resolve
> somerandomdomain.com, and bind gets no response from the relevent
> nameserver because the link is dead, it will cache that fact, and
> subsequent queries will give an immediate SERVFAIL response.  Can anyone
> tell me how to configure bind (9.1.0) to not do this?
>
> 4) because of (2), there are often cases where I can resolve
> somerandomdomain.com, but their dns can't.  So what do you think happens
> when I try to get a web page from that server?  Well, I try to initiate a
> conenction to <the right ip> port 80, it gets redirected to their
> "transparent" proxy, and the proxy returns me a page saying "dns error".
>
> Oh, and despite being able to point to a site where this often happens,
> and managing to get on the phone to one of their "techs" before their dns
> fixed itself (leaving me with nothing to point at), the guy I talked to
> tried to convince me that they were not running a proxy at all, and that
> "the website was just down".  Never mind that I could get the page in
> question by requesting http://<the ip>/ (in general, that fails dismally,
> as just about every webhost out there has a dozen or more virtualhosts on
> it).
>
> Let's think about this.  I request a page from a site, and someone serves
> me a page saying dns error.  If the name really failed to resolve, the
> request would never leave my box, would it?
>
> (5) They have managed to overcharge me on every single bill so far (e.g.
> charging me for excess traffic when I'm 400Mb short of my quota).  These
> charges were put straight on my credit card, *despite* the fact I paid in
> advance for the connection, and *specifically requested* that they *not*
> store my credit card info - and repeated that request after each time they
> mischarged me.
>
> I now have the personal assurances of their manager that this will not
> happen again, and that she has now removed my credit card details from
> their records.  To their credit, they did handle each complaint about
> billing promptly, refunding the money, and they may have actually fixed
> the problem this time - but they didn't fix it last time, despite assuring
> me that they did.
>
> > can anyone recommend a good transact ISP?
>
> I hear webone became available through transact last monday.  I've dealt
> with them before (only modem dialin accounts though), and not had any
> problems.  I'll be ringing netspeed up on monday, and telling them that if
> they don't get their act together, I'll be terminating my contract with
> them, and moving across (webone is also cheaper).
>
> Andrew