TransACT 5 months in...

[Brett Worth]

I've been on TransACT for 5 months now and thought I'd share my impressions
so far. 

<RANT>

What I like:

The home package that I signed up for included 256K data channel.  I've
consistently been getting 50Kbytes download so the 256K is really 500k.

WebOne, my ISP, has been very good.  Good support and the person who
answers the phone is generally someone technical.  The connection has been
very reliable.

The TV channels provided are OK.  Most of my viewing has been on the
old free-to-air channels but the reception is better that I used to get
from the rabbit ears.

The telephone component has been OK but I'm yet to see what happens if
there's a problem.

What worries me:

I know a couple of people who subscribe to Telstra ADSL and while the
reliability is rumoured to be bad the resources seem to be much better.
e.g. the access to plenty of Linux downloads inside the ADSL network that
doesn't contribute to your download quota.  The Linux ftp area at webone is
still "under construction".

I realise that Telstra seem to be under pricing their ADSL but even with
the recent price rises it seems a lot cheaper than TransACT from any ISP.

Webone offer no-charge data transfer between subscribers so I could setup
my own ftp area to serve a few linux cds to other webone users. Of course
this would be better done from inside webone.  Perhaps we could offer
to donate recent linux cds to webone for them to serve from an FTP server.
Of course if the TransACT peer-to-peer existed this could benefit
subscribers to all TransACT ISPs.

The contract with TransACT is only for 12 months so I'm wondering what I
should do at the end of that period.  Will TransACT ever match Telstra in
pricing and resources?  What ever happened to peer-to-peer on TransACT?
Are and TransACT ISPs is actually offering a linux download area?

</RANT>
-- 
Brett

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 brettw at cray.com +61 2 6295 4023

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