why iinet rocks
So, our local ISP is IINet.
Here are some reasons I like them:
24 Mb/s downloads. Yes, that's megabit. Our connectivity isn't as great as my neighbours (we're on different exchanges). He regularly gets over 1000 kBytes/sec speeds. We still hit 400 kBytes/sec all the time though.
I get this performance for the same price as I was paying for 256 kb/s in New Zealand.
There's no charge for traffic to/from the ISP - which just happens to include full mirrors of debian, ubuntu, and tons of other stuff (games, movies-on-demand, etc etc etc). So yes, my linux systems are kept up to date at super high speeds, for free.
Caps are 20G peak and 40G offpeak, with shaping once past that. This isn't as great as all-you-can-eat that's common in Europe/USA, but we're also not connected to the world except by lots of water. In this part of the world, that's very generous.
In the past two years I've been with them, I've had to reboot my router twice. We've had a single outage of a couple of hours (when big chunks of the city went down due to telephone exchange failure).
They have a very sexy toolbox that shows up to the minute bandwidth usage, allows you to tweak your speeds, and a whole host of other nifty functions.
We have VOIP (ie, our regular phone goes out over the internet) that's as cheap as Skype for a third of the cost of a regular phone.
And the thing that brings about this post - we just upgraded to a higher cap plan - having overrun our limit slightly. Because both Gala & I work from home, slow speeds (even for the last week of the month) are particularly painful. While on the phone to them we begged and pleaded for a bit of extra bandwidth to get us over the next week. What did they do? They pushed us up to the maximum cap plan, for FREE, until the end of the month.
Oh, and they told us it would be done within an hour.... it was done in three minutes.
I LOVE companies like this.
Here are some reasons I like them:
24 Mb/s downloads. Yes, that's megabit. Our connectivity isn't as great as my neighbours (we're on different exchanges). He regularly gets over 1000 kBytes/sec speeds. We still hit 400 kBytes/sec all the time though.
I get this performance for the same price as I was paying for 256 kb/s in New Zealand.
There's no charge for traffic to/from the ISP - which just happens to include full mirrors of debian, ubuntu, and tons of other stuff (games, movies-on-demand, etc etc etc). So yes, my linux systems are kept up to date at super high speeds, for free.
Caps are 20G peak and 40G offpeak, with shaping once past that. This isn't as great as all-you-can-eat that's common in Europe/USA, but we're also not connected to the world except by lots of water. In this part of the world, that's very generous.
In the past two years I've been with them, I've had to reboot my router twice. We've had a single outage of a couple of hours (when big chunks of the city went down due to telephone exchange failure).
They have a very sexy toolbox that shows up to the minute bandwidth usage, allows you to tweak your speeds, and a whole host of other nifty functions.
We have VOIP (ie, our regular phone goes out over the internet) that's as cheap as Skype for a third of the cost of a regular phone.
And the thing that brings about this post - we just upgraded to a higher cap plan - having overrun our limit slightly. Because both Gala & I work from home, slow speeds (even for the last week of the month) are particularly painful. While on the phone to them we begged and pleaded for a bit of extra bandwidth to get us over the next week. What did they do? They pushed us up to the maximum cap plan, for FREE, until the end of the month.
Oh, and they told us it would be done within an hour.... it was done in three minutes.
I LOVE companies like this.