Advice Sought: Canberra ISP's

[Mark Paine]

Quoting James McNeill <james at heague.com.au>:

> I'll suggest using TPG (www.tpg.com.au) out of gratitude for their free
> night-rider service that they afford me.(yes, it's free to everyone else
> too). TPG's normal dial-up is quite cheep, and I've been happy with them.
> I've heared unsubstanciated complaints about them, but hey.
> --TPG doesn't block any ports and is good for web servering etc.

I had a dial-up TPG account for over 6yrs (joined up in Wollongong) and 
recently left them as I was unhappy with their network performance.  Some sites 
I could not access at all of an evening as connections timed out. (They did 
work during the day though!)  Transfers would also bubble along at less than 
1Kbps.  I bit the bullet, and left them.  Yes they are cheap, but in peak times 
(ie an evening), their performance was lacking.  Other than that, they were 
fine.
 
> Webone (preferably pronounced Wee-Bone ;-) ) is widely used and works over
> TransACT if you have it. Unfortunatly they bock port 25 altogether, so you
> can't receive emails on your SMTP webserver :-(      www.webone.com.au

I moved to WebOne.  Been with them for only a couple of months and have been 
very happy with them.  They are not the cheapest around but they do perform 
better, and interact with you far better than what TPG ever did for me.  You 
get monthly statements emailed to you stating what traffic you used and how 
much they charge you (yes, TPG will give you this info, but you have to go to a 
web site to find it out and in the process log-in twice - WebOne also provides 
a web site for this info so you can find out during the month).  Not to mention 
their off-peak rates of half cost traffic.  (Midnight to 9:30am I think - ie 
you download 20Mb, but only charged for 10Mb.)

The other thing that amazed me about WebOne is they actually sent out an email 
apologising for slow performance due to a router fault - then followed it up a 
couple of days later with an explanation about what went wrong.  For a tech 
head, its nice to know info. The explanation was twofold, a simple one and a 
more detailed one. The other advantge with WebOne in my case is that one of 
their dial-up numbers is on the same exchange as me so I get it as a 
neighbourhood call, and can connect at 31.2 most times instead of 28.8. (Curse 
Telstra and their RIMs.) WebOne also suport TransACT, ADSL and ISDN connections 
as well as dial-up so options are there for higher speed without changing ISP 
if you so desire.

There are some other Canberra based ISPs (Galaxy, NetSpeed to name two others), 
but have had no experience with them at all.  ACTEW/AGL (our local consolidated 
electricity, water and gas supplier) has also entered the ISP market.

Mark P.
--
.sig - TBA
CBR AU


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