transact vpn- vapourware private network

[Matthew Hawkins]

Simon Haddon (simon at sibern.com.au) wrote:
> Sheeze,  I'm just about to get TransACT as the savings on the phone lines 
> alone are worth it. I get extra TV channels with it and I want to use the 
> Internet broadband.  Are you guys saying that I'm better off forgetting 
> it?

Different people are getting transact for different reasons, if you've
already ordered it then please come to your own conclusions about how
well the service works for you.

My only gripe with them is that they've made the fatal business choice
in marketing before being able to provide the service, which means for a
lot of people who live in the ACT and won't be visited by TransACT for
another 4 years, the service sounds nice but they'll be getting a
similar one at half the cost and twice the bandwidth by the time the
TransACT van rolls around their neck of the woods.

There is a *huge* market of gamers who just want enough bandwidth at a
decent latency that they can play LAN games at little/no cost with their
friends without the need to lug around $3000 worth of gear to someone's
house and troubleshoot network connections for 4 hours.  That's one
appeal of the free p2p network (TransCity, was it?) and most if not all
of the folks I've talked to about this are fed up with waiting after all
the hype.

I just want an easy way for Sam to tunnel in to this place so we can use
the wiki on my web server to collaborate on some projects we do to pass
the time, and use BitKeeper/CVS/whatever as you do.  That's currently
"openvpn" which was 3 seconds worth of "apt-get install openvpn" and 5
minutes of reading man pages to get a fully authenticated and encrypted
tunnel going.

Just out of interest, since it's mainly MCI/sprint/worldcom's fault that
Telstra bend us consumers over a similar barrel to the one they are wrt
traffic charges, what'll happen now that worldcom are in a bit of
financial trouble?

-- 
Matt