ISP woes
Those International phone carriers I mentioned in the previous post are often also ISP companies.
This is a rant about the ISP
services of the same Barak company from the previous post. But I never
used them for Internet connection myself, so this is all hearsay. Of
course, this is hearsay from what I consider trusted sources…
First, I have a friend that the company he worked for used them as an ISP.
After several months they broke off, and switched to someone else.
According to my friend this was due to many connectivity problems, many
times where the supplied bandwidth didn’t match what they were paying
for, and problems with customer services.
Second, I have another friend who used them for his home ISP. And encountered two interesting problems:
- He needed to access some websites in Hong Kong. And while those
sites were linked to from other sites and forums, he was never able to
connect, like the sites are down. Until at some point he tried
connecting from a computer in another place, and got there without any
problems. Some more testing revealed that he couldn’t get to those
sites from home, but can from about anywhere else with different ISPs.
And just in case anyone wonders, there is nothing in Barak’s terms
specifying that they do, or can, block sites. And this was a simple
commercial site, in any case. - He received very low bandwidth trying to download things using P2P file-sharing programs like eMule.
For normal file downloads, he did get the bandwidth he was paying for.
It wasn’t configuration problems, and those were not files with very
low availability. Again, nothing in Barak’s terms specified them
blocking/slowing any sort of traffic.
He contacted their
customer support about those two problems, asking if his impressions of
site blocking, and protocol filtering, are correct.
Their reply? They offered him a huge discount for an even higher
bandwidth connection. Yep, nothing about the problem, just offering him
to pay less. Sounds very… evasive, doesn’t it?
Needless to say, he said bye-bye and switched. Since then he can connect to those sites, and the eMule download speed has improved drastically…
April 1st, 2005 at 15:47 EET | Categories: Web |
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